Case studies · Eliza Labs · Nov 2024–Mar 2026
Thousands of hosted agents, billed and answered at the edge
At Eliza Labs I owned the revenue path for hosted AI agents: credits, API keys, and quotas that stayed correct under concurrency — plus a plugin autocoder that cut setup ~70% and an automated reply bot the founder said was crushing it.
What changed
- Thousands of long-running hosted agents could be issued a key, metered, and cut off at quota — on Cloudflare Workers, not a nightly job.
- Plugin setup time down about 70%: an autocoder wrote the boilerplate from a spec instead of a human.
- An automated reply bot ran in production. Shaw Walters, founder: “Sam is a beast.” “sam has been CRUSHING IT on an automated reply bot.”
- Open-source runtime at 15,000+ GitHub stars and 100+ contributors. I reviewed and merged that work. Mentored interns fully async across a 12-hour gap.
- Stayed through a $20M round. I did not found Eliza. I did not own the token. I owned billing.
Why it mattered
A billing bug is money and access, wrong, while every agent hits the edge at once. A missing reply is the founder doing support by hand. A plugin that takes a week to stand up is a contributor who never ships. Same constraint in all three: decide what the system may settle without a human — before the first request.
What I actually owned
- API-key issuance, usage metering, accounting, quota enforcement.
- Plugin autocoder from a spec.
- Automated reply bot (Twitter/Discord) the founder used in public.
- Core maintainer: review, merge, intern mentorship.
Stack
TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, usage metering, quota enforcement under concurrency.