Specimen · catalogued monster

The Token Vampire

Drains your credits overnight

A courteous aristocrat of the cloud, it glides in through any open endpoint and dines quietly while the office sleeps. By the time finance switches the lights on, it has vanished, leaving only an invoice with a suspiciously elegant signature.

Symptoms

• LLM or GPU invoices that jump month to month
• Agents or jobs looping unattended
• No cost attribution by team, product or use case
• Warehouse credits burned by runaway queries
• Budgets exhausted before month end

Overheard in the corridor

• “Who left the agent running all weekend?”
• “Our token spend tripled and I can't tell you why.”
• “Finance wants a forecast and I can't even explain last month.”
• “We used the biggest model for everything because it was easiest.”