Agent Swarms Are Here. Who's Controlling the Spend?

The agent era shifted gears. It's no longer one agent, one task, one API key. It's swarms — coordinator agents spawning specialist agents, each making their own API calls, each spending money. And the cost math changes dramatically when agents multiply. The Multiplication Problem A single agent making 100 API calls per task is manageable. A coordinator that spawns 5 sub-agents, each making 100 calls, each spawning 3 more specialists? That's 2,000+ calls from what started as one request. Project Manager (budget: $500) ├── Research Agent (delegated: $100) │ ├── Web Search Agent ($30) │ └── Data Analysis Agent ($70) ├── Coding Agent (delegated: $200) │ ├── Test Agent ($50) │ └── Docs Agent ($30) └── Design Agent (delegated: $100) └── Image Gen Agent ($80) # 8 agents, all spending concurrently # Without governance: $500 budget becomes $??? The problem isn't that agents are expensive individually. It's that they compound. A coding agent that loops on a failing test, a research agent that br