u/Interesting-Arm-2315

Building  governed payment OS that lets automation/agents top up ad accounts in India with strict vendor allowlists, budget caps, HITL overrides, and a tamper‑proof audit trail. INR‑native (not crypto). Running paid pilots with agencies now.

Quick poll:

• How much revenue do you lose per hour if a campaign goes dark? (₹)
• Would you prefer a % take-rate (0.3–0.8%) or a flat ₹25–50k/month for guaranteed uptime?

If you run >₹5L/month in ad spend and want a pilot, reply or DM “pilot”.

Poll options

• A: % take-rate — 0.3% of spend
• B: % take-rate — 0.6% of spend
• C: Flat fee — ₹30k/month
• D: Not interested / prefer existing pre-funding

Please also comment your typical monthly ad spend (approx) helps us segment. If you want a pilot, reply “pilot” and I’ll DM next steps.

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Spent the last few months building agent workflows for performance marketing and kept hitting the same wall.

Agent detects ROAS spike at 11PM. Recommends pushing more budget. Actual money movement still needs a human — bank login, OTP, wait 4 hours for transfer to reflect. By morning the window is gone.

Built a solution that handles this. Before I go further wanted to check if this is actually a widespread problem or just my specific situation.

Here is what it does:

You set rules once in plain English. Something like:

"If Google Ads balance drops below ₹10,000 before 6PM — top up ₹25,000 automatically."

"If ROAS is above 4x and budget is running low — release up to ₹2L without asking me."

"Anything above ₹5L — send me a WhatsApp and wait for my reply."

Agent follows those rules. Money moves automatically within policy. Every transaction logged with timestamp and reason. GST-formatted report auto-generated monthly.

For India specifically — built on UPI and card rails, RBI-compliant, no crypto, no USDC. Works with normal Indian bank accounts and ad platform billing.

Genuinely want to know:

Is this a problem you're actively dealing with or is it occasional enough that manual handling is fine?

If something like this existed — what would make you trust it enough to actually connect it to a live ad account?

What's the one rule you'd set first if you could?

Drop a comment or DM if you want to be part of a small pilot group. Looking for 3–5 agencies or growth teams to test this with. Free for 90 days. One ad account to start. 30 minutes to set up.

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If your agent can do everything except handle money we're looking for 4-5 startups to pilot a fix.

DM me if that's you.

Building an agent that needs to buy API credits and data. When it hits a paywall, autonomy breaks. I have to manually step in with my credit card. If I give the agent my actual card info, gateways flag it, plus giving an LLM unlimited access to my bank account is terrifying. Thinking of building a wrapper API that issues disposable virtual Visa cards with strict $5/day limits just for the agent. Has anyone else dealt with this?

Building an agent that needs to buy API credits and data. When it hits a paywall, autonomy breaks. I have to manually step in with my credit card. If I give the agent my actual card info, gateways flag it, plus giving an LLM unlimited access to my bank account is terrifying. Thinking of building a wrapper API that issues disposable virtual Visa cards with strict $5/day limits just for the agent. Has anyone else dealt with this?

Building an agent that needs to buy API credits and data. When it hits a paywall, autonomy breaks. I have to manually step in with my credit card. If I give the agent my actual card info, gateways flag it, plus giving an LLM unlimited access to my bank account is terrifying. Thinking of building a wrapper API that issues disposable virtual Visa cards with strict $5/day limits just for the agent. Has anyone else dealt with this?

ok so I'm in finance ops at a ~200 person Series B and I need a sanity check because I genuinely cannot tell anymore if I'm bad at my job or if everyone is just kind of losing at this.

we have like 70–90 SaaS tools. I've been here just over a year. every single renewal goes the same way:

I find out we have a renewal coming up because I'm reconciling the credit card statement. not from a calendar, not from the vendor, from a charge that already hit. cool.

I go ask the department head if we still need it. they say "yes obviously" without looking at the usage data. half the time when I do pull the usage, it's like 4 people logging in once a month on a 25-seat plan.

then I try to negotiate. the AE on the other side has been planning this conversation for 11 months. I have been planning it for 4 days. they "check with their manager," come back with 5% off and a straight face. I take it because I have a board meeting on Thursday and I just need this off my plate.

we tried Vendr last year. six weeks of meetings, a deck, a slack channel, and at the end of it they told us we were overpaying for Salesforce. yeah. I knew. CFO does not want to renew them.

so I'm asking, honestly:

• is anyone at this size actually happy with Sastrify / Spendflo / Tropic, or is it all the same consulting-with-a-dashboard thing
• does anyone DIY this? like do you just have a really good spreadsheet and a friend at another startup who tells you what they pay
• did anyone just hire a real procurement person and that fixed it
• or is the actual answer "yeah everyone overpays by 30%, that's the tax for moving fast, stop worrying about it"

I would unironically feel better hearing option 4 than continuing to flail. how are you all handling this.

Just did an audit for a 60-person company. Found out they were paying for 14 Slack seats, 8 Notion accounts, and a bunch of random Canva/ChatGPT subs for employees who left 6 months ago. Almost $800/month literally set on fire.

The IT guy offboards email, but forgets the random SaaS tools.

Looked at tools like BetterCloud or Zluri, but they want enterprise money ($10k+) and take months to set up. We just need a dumb, simple "find unused seats and kill them" button for SMBs.

How are you guys handling this? Just giant Excel checklists? If there was a $99/mo tool that just plugged into Google Workspace/O365 and flagged active SaaS billing for dead emails, would you use it, or is the spreadsheet life fine?