This month the front page filled up with AI agents going off the rails — one reportedly ran its operator's bill into the ground, another tore through a Linux box unsupervised. Funny, until it's your credits and your customers. We learned that lesson the slower, more expensive way.
Our team shipped an AI demo in a weekend. Turning it into something people could actually pay for took the next four months, and almost none of that time went into the AI part.
That gap surprised us more than it should have. The model call was maybe 30 lines. Everything around it — getting paid, knowing who to thank for a signup, stopping one script from burning $400 of credits overnight — was the real product. Below is what we got wrong on the way there, in roughly the order it hurt.
Pitfall 1: "We'll just add Stripe later"
Later is a lie. The moment you charge for AI usage, billing stops being a checkout button and becomes a metering problem.
