cost-tracking

cost-tracking is a skill for Claude Code from brody-0125/my-claude-skills. It costs 21 tokens per session (933 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Reference instructions and utilities for estimating Claude API usage costs from token counts. They include model-specific prices and formulas for request and session estimates.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use them to estimate request costs, session costs, cache-related costs, and the uncertainty of character-to-token estimates.
Why use it?
They help teams calculate or compare API spending when usage data is available or must be approximated from tool output size.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: user-invocable in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the plugin-introspector plugin — 4 skills shipped together

Good fit Use them to estimate request costs, session costs, cache-related costs, and the uncertainty of character-to-token estimates.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add brody-0125/my-claude-skills --skill cost-tracking
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/brody-0125/my-claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install plugin-introspector, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cost-tracking

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for cost-tracking

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/brody-0125/my-claude-skills/cost-tracking.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 21 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 933 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00021 $0.00933
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00466
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00187
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00093

Measured 12d ago against content hash 1428bd1e70f9, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cost-tracking scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/plugin-introspector/skills/cost-tracking/SKILL.md · 115 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 115 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cost Tracking — Model Pricing & Calculation

Provides pricing data and calculation methods for API cost estimation.

Model Pricing (per 1M tokens, USD)

Model Input Output Cache Write (5m) Cache Read
claude-opus-4-6 $5.00 $25.00 $6.25 $0.50
claude-sonnet-4-5 $3.00 $15.00 $3.75 $0.30
claude-haiku-4-5 $1.00 $5.00 $1.25 $0.10

Prices as of 2026-02. Source: platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing. Update when pricing changes.

Cost Calculation

Per-Request Cost

cost = (input_tokens × input_price / 1_000_000) +
       (output_tokens × output_price / 1_000_000) +
       (cache_write_tokens × cache_write_price / 1_000_000) +
       (cache_read_tokens × cache_read_price / 1_000_000)

Session Cost Estimation

When actual API token counts are unavailable, use estimates:

estimated_input_tokens = sum(tool_input_chars) / 4
estimated_output_tokens = sum(tool_result_chars) / 4
estimated_cost = estimated_input_tokens × input_price / 1_000_000 +
                 estimated_output_tokens × output_price / 1_000_000

Accuracy note: chars/4 estimation has ±20% error. Actual API usage data (from api_traces.jsonl) provides exact costs when available.

Budget Thresholds

Level Threshold Action
INFO >$0.50/session Log to stats
WARNING >$2.00/session Alert (MEDIUM severity)
CRITICAL >$10.00/session Alert (HIGH severity)

Cost Efficiency Metrics

Metric Formula Target
Cost per tool call session_cost / tool_calls <$0.03
Cost per productive call session_cost / productive_calls <$0.05
Input/Output ratio input_tokens / output_tokens 3:1 to 6:1 (normal range)

Improvement ROI Scoring

Formula for prioritizing improvement proposals:

ROI_score = (Impact × Confidence) / (Effort × Risk)

Read the full file on GitHub · 115 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 115 lines · 21 tokens per session scan A 1428bd1e70f9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cost-tracking is a skill published in the GitHub repository brody-0125/my-claude-skills (2 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 21 tokens to every session and 933 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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