# Multi-agent crews and runaway spend anyone solved delegation without a shared budget ceiling? **URL:** \ **Category:** General\ **Tags:** crewai\ **Created:** [August 14, 2026, 7:25pm UTC](https://community.crewai.com/t/multi-agent-crews-and-runaway-spend-anyone-solved-delegation-without-a-shared-budget-ceiling/7726 "2026-08-14T19:25:22Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![Debo\_Jolaosho](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e274bd/32.png) [@Debo\_Jolaosho](https://community.crewai.com/u/Debo_Jolaosho)\ **Post date:** [August 14, 2026, 7:25pm UTC](https://community.crewai.com/t/multi-agent-crews-and-runaway-spend-anyone-solved-delegation-without-a-shared-budget-ceiling/7726/1 "2026-08-14T19:25:22Z")
Running a crew where one agent delegates sub-tasks to others, and a couple of those sub-agents have tools that call paid services. The delegation pattern is great for capability, but it also means I’ve got N agents each independently deciding to spend money, with no shared awareness of a budget across the crew. Concretely: agent A delegates a research task to agent B, B decides it needs three paid API calls to do it well, and there’s nothing stopping B from deciding that three more times if the first pass isn’t satisfying. Multiply that across a crew of five and the blast radius if something misfires is a lot bigger than a single-agent chain. Has anyone built (or found) something like a shared spend ceiling that the whole crew respects, independent of which agent is making the call? Interested in whether people are handling this at the crew config level or bolting on something external. --- _[View the full topic](https://community.crewai.com/t/multi-agent-crews-and-runaway-spend-anyone-solved-delegation-without-a-shared-budget-ceiling/7726)._