Pass-through is the practice of shifting an added cost to another party, usually by raising prices or adding fees. In digital businesses, this can happen when taxes, cloud spend, payment processing charges, or abuse-related expenses are built into what the customer pays. The legal payer and the economic bearer are not always the same, so pass-through is a key concept in pricing, billing, and compliance.
In cyber security, pass-through matters because attacks often create hidden costs. Fraudulent traffic, bot activity, account takeover, and API abuse can consume bandwidth, storage, compute, or transaction capacity. A weakly protected platform may absorb those costs itself or pass them on through higher fees and degraded service. Defenses include rate limiting, quota controls, anomaly detection, cost monitoring, and clear billing rules so unexpected usage is detected early and not silently shifted downstream.