Monitor your AI API usage and costs

Cost Tracking

AutoClaw provides unified cost tracking across all AI providers, so you always know what you're spending.

Overview

The cost dashboard shows:

  • Total spend — Cumulative costs across all providers
  • Daily breakdown — Costs by day for the current billing period
  • By provider — Split between Anthropic, OpenAI, and others
  • By model — Which models are using the most tokens

Viewing Costs

  1. Go to Dashboard → Costs in the sidebar
  2. Select your date range
  3. View the breakdown

Cost Summary

The summary card shows:

| Metric | Description | |--------|-------------| | Today | Costs incurred today | | This week | Rolling 7-day total | | This month | Current billing period total | | Projected | Estimated monthly total based on usage |

Usage Details

The detailed view shows:

  • Tokens in — Input tokens (your messages)
  • Tokens out — Output tokens (agent responses)
  • Total tokens — Combined usage
  • Cost — Calculated cost based on provider pricing

Provider Breakdown

Anthropic (Claude)

Costs are calculated based on Anthropic's published pricing:

| Model | Input | Output | |-------|-------|--------| | Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3.00/M tokens | $15.00/M tokens | | Claude 3.5 Haiku | $0.80/M tokens | $4.00/M tokens | | Claude 3 Opus | $15.00/M tokens | $75.00/M tokens |

OpenAI (GPT)

Costs are calculated based on OpenAI's published pricing:

| Model | Input | Output | |-------|-------|--------| | GPT-4o | $2.50/M tokens | $10.00/M tokens | | GPT-4o mini | $0.15/M tokens | $0.60/M tokens | | GPT-4 Turbo | $10.00/M tokens | $30.00/M tokens |

Note: Prices shown are approximate and may change. AutoClaw uses current provider pricing for calculations.

Cost Alerts

Set up alerts to avoid surprise bills:

  1. Go to Settings → Alerts
  2. Set a daily limit or monthly limit
  3. Choose notification method (email, in-app)

When you approach or exceed your limit, AutoClaw will notify you.

Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK)

With BYOK, you use your own API keys and pay providers directly:

  • Full control — You own the relationship with the provider
  • No markup — Pay provider prices directly
  • Usage visibility — See exactly what you're using

AutoClaw just tracks and displays the usage; billing goes through your provider account.

Optimizing Costs

Tips for reducing AI costs:

Use Efficient Models

  • Use Haiku or GPT-4o mini for simple tasks
  • Reserve Opus or GPT-4 for complex reasoning

Manage Context

  • Shorter conversations = fewer tokens
  • Use session pruning to limit context length
  • Summarize long conversations

Batch Operations

  • Group related requests when possible
  • Use scheduled tasks during off-peak hours

Export Data

Export your usage data for accounting:

  1. Go to Costs → Export
  2. Select date range
  3. Choose format (CSV, JSON)
  4. Download

Learn More