DIREKT Cost Guardrails

Objective

Prevent uncontrolled infrastructure and verification cost while preserving trust quality.

Cost centres

Maps/geocoding, SMS/OTP, storage/egress, evidence processing, database/compute, notifications/email, monitoring, field visits, reviewer/support labour and payments.

Controls

  • budgets/alerts per environment;
  • sandbox/staging quotas;
  • map search debouncing/caching consistent with licence;
  • SMS rate limits and fallback;
  • image compression/derivatives;
  • retention/lifecycle;
  • queue batching;
  • field visits only by requirement/risk;
  • no approval incentive;
  • per-provider/category unit-cost dashboard;
  • vendor abstraction and contract review.

Stop triggers

Unexpected daily spend, repeated OTP abuse, runaway job, map-key exposure, storage growth, verification backlog or negative unit economics.

Pages

Use public Pages for static collaboration, not as a workaround for secure backend requirements.