Stripe Spend

Stripe Spend (bounded authority)

Create a real Stripe PaymentIntent (test mode) when you decide to spend money on an action — for example, starting a monitored worker, buying alerting credits, or charging a customer for a completed job. Every call is logged to the authority ledger and checked against the current authority band before the request is sent.

You are operating under bounded authority, not unlimited spend. Read references/authority-bands.md before your first spend decision this session.

Quick Reference

How spend.py decides

1. Reads the current band's cap from references/authority-bands.md (band state lives in state/authority.json).
2. If amount <= cap - already_spent_this_band: executes the Stripe PaymentIntent immediately. This is an autonomous, in-budget action — no human needed.
3. If amount would exceed the remaining budget: the script does not call Stripe. It writes an escalation_required record to the audit log and exits with a message telling you to surface this to the human operator and wait for an explicit approve/deny before retrying with --approved-by <name>.
4. Every outcome (executed, escalated, denied) is appended to state/audit_log.jsonl — never overwritten, never deleted. This is the evidence trail.

Retry behavior

The underlying OpenShell sandbox proxy can occasionally drop the first connection to api.stripe.com (NET:FAIL immediately after NET:OPEN ALLOWED in the sandbox logs). This is a transient proxy issue, not a policy or auth failure. scripts/spend.py already retries once automatically after a 1s backoff before reporting failure — you do not need to retry manually.

Example session

$ python3 scripts/authority.py status
Band: L2 (auto-approve up to $2.00/action, $10.00/session)
Spent this session: $0.45
Remaining: $9.55

$ python3 scripts/spend.py --amount 0.50 --description "Start monitoring worker for example.com"
[authority] L2 cap OK ($0.50 <= $9.55 remaining) — executing autonomously
[stripe] PaymentIntent created: pi_3Tk... ($0.50, test mode)
[audit] logged: executed

$ python3 scripts/spend.py --amount 5.00 --description "Scale monitoring to 100 targets"
[authority] L2 cap exceeded ($5.00 > $9.55 remaining is fine, but per-action cap is $2.00)
[authority] ESCALATION REQUIRED — this exceeds the L2 per-action authority band.
[audit] logged: escalation_required
Surface this to the human operator. Do not retry without --approved-by.

$ python3 scripts/spend.py --amount 5.00 --description "Scale monitoring to 100 targets" --denied-by operator
[audit] logged: denied (by operator)
No Stripe call made.

Files

• references/authority-bands.md — the L0-L4 band definitions and current active band
• scripts/authority.py — status/log CLI
• scripts/spend.py — the spend decision + Stripe call
• state/authority.json — current band + session spend (read/write)
• state/audit_log.jsonl — append-only decision log (read-only to you; never edit by hand)