Operating cost is observable, capped, and attributed.

Cost invisible until invoice arrives

Aggregate cost visible, no attribution

Per-project / per-run cost tracked, capped, alerted on overrun. Cost-prone domains with runaway characteristics (verbose logging, inference tokens, canary spin-up) have domain-specific containment mechanisms in addition to global observability — see recipes under this criterion's `criteria_advanced` for known-good shapes (e.g. [dynamic debug logging](recipes/dynamic-debug-logging.md) for verbose-logging containment)

Cost anomalies auto-investigated; expensive patterns flagged before recurrence; cost-per-feature-type baselined and tracked