A short piece of fiction, written by API Evangelist. The reader is imagined; the post, and every number and quotation from it, is real: "A Meter With No Rate On It," Kin Lane, October 26, 2026, https://apievangelist.com/2026/10/26/a-meter-with-no-rate-on-it/
Marisol read the post on Monday evening, after the office had emptied out. She was a platform engineer at a mid-size logistics company, and she had a half-built agent sitting in a sandbox that she had been meaning to register for production.
The facts were easy enough to take in. Salesforce would charge Flex Credits when registered agents call into a production org, over MCP or straight through the API. Sandboxes and Developer Edition orgs weren't metered. Nothing was being billed yet, and customers would get 30 days' notice. The price was listed as TBA.
Her first reaction was irritation, though not at Salesforce. The author kept saying a provider is allowed to price this, and then spent three sections on why this provider was doing it wrong. She had spent years watching integrations hammer systems that were never designed for the load. Metering agents seemed fair to her, and she half wanted to write that in a comment.
The first complaint, about the missing rate, was harder to wave off. She tried to picture the budget request she would have to write. She would need to say how many calls the agent would make, and she couldn't. The post said as much: the agents decide how many calls they make. She had a rough guess from the sandbox logs, but it was a guess about a thing that would then be multiplied by a number nobody had given her. Her manager would ask what it costs, and the honest answer was that it was unknown. The author's line that the person approving the agent can't read the meter stung a little, because that person was going to be her.
The second argument she liked less. Pricing the outcome instead of the call sounded tidy, but she had never seen a vendor do it cleanly, and the post didn't claim one had. Still, the retry-loop point stayed with her. A call that accomplishes something and a call stuck in a loop would cost the same.
What bothered her most was the third section. The post argued that tying the meter to registration makes good governance look like a toll booth, and then spelled out what people do about it: they put off registering and wrap agents in user credentials. She felt caught out. Her own plan for the weekend had been to let the agent borrow a service account and sort out proper registration later. She had called that a shortcut. The post called it routing around the identity layer.
She didn't agree with everything. She still thought the author was too generous to the idea that a vendor should simply eat the cost of registration. But the post's proposal was plain: "Keep the agent identity, and make it free." She could see why the author wanted that, and she couldn't find a reason to do the opposite herself.
She also kept returning to a line near the end, that call volume should be treated as "a rate limit to manage, not a revenue line to optimize". Her team had no such limit on the agent. It had no ceiling at all.
So she did one small thing. She opened the agent's design note and added two lines at the top. The first said registration would not be skipped to avoid a charge, and that the service-account shortcut was off the table. The second said she would put a daily call ceiling in the agent's own config and write down what it was. Then she saved the file and went home, and the budget question stayed open.