# Howdy. I built budget controls for AI agents, does this solve a problem you actually have?

> Source: <https://dev.to/mightbesaad/howdy-i-built-budget-controls-for-ai-agents-does-this-solve-a-problem-you-actually-have-16dj>
> Published: 2026-06-05 21:21:35+00:00

been building AI agent infrastructure for the past few months. The two things that kept biting me —

and kept coming up when I talked to other devs building agents — were runaway costs and agents doing

irreversible things without asking first.

So I built gvnr: an open-source MCP server that gives agents per-agent spend caps (hard-stop before a

call if the budget's gone) and a human approval gate (agent asks, you get a mobile link, you approve or

deny, agent waits). Both work as plain REST calls or MCP tools — no platform to adopt, no SDK.

It's live. You can get an API key in one curl command and try the approval gate for free (it doesn't burn

the trial ops). Source is at [github.com/mightbesaad/gvnr](https://github.com/mightbesaad/gvnr).

Here's what I genuinely want to know from devs building in this space:

Not fishing for encouragement — if this is solving the wrong problem, or solving it the wrong way, I'd

rather know now.