Agent Cost Monitor — Know What Your Agents Cost

Track token usage, costs, and efficiency across all your OpenClaw agents in real-time. Get alerts before you blow your budget.

Triggers

Activate this skill when:

• User asks "how much am I spending?" or "which agent uses the most tokens?"
• User asks about rate limits, token usage, or budget warnings
• A cron job fires with the cost-report payload
• Suspected runaway agent (unusually high token burn)
• Weekly or daily cost-hygiene review

NOT For

• Billing management — paying invoices, updating payment methods, or managing API subscriptions (do that directly in provider dashboards)
• Model pricing research — looking up current API rates or comparing provider costs (use web search for that)
• Session debugging — diagnosing why a session crashed or behaved incorrectly (use error recovery protocol)

The Problem

Running multiple agents is powerful — but expensive if you're not watching:

• Which agent is burning the most tokens?
• Are heartbeats wasting money on expensive models?
• Is caching actually saving you anything?
• When will you hit your weekly rate limit?

What This Skill Does

When triggered (via cron or manually), the agent:

1. Checks session_status for each agent
2. Calculates per-agent and total costs
3. Compares against budget thresholds
4. Sends alerts if limits are approaching
5. Suggests optimization moves

Usage

Ask your monitoring agent (or any agent with this skill):

"Give me a cost report for all agents"
"Which agent used the most tokens today?"
"Am I going to hit my rate limit this week?"

Automated Daily Report (Cron)

{
  "name": "Daily Cost Report",
  "schedule": { "kind": "cron", "expr": "0 20 * * *", "tz": "Europe/Berlin" },
  "payload": {
    "kind": "agentTurn",
    "message": "Run a cost report across all agents. Check session_status for each. Report: total tokens, cost per agent, top spender, budget warnings. Send summary to user."
  },
  "sessionTarget": "isolated",
  "delivery": { "mode": "announce" }
}

Cost Report Format

When generating a report, use this structure:

## 💰 Agent Cost Report — [Date]

### Per-Agent Breakdown
| Agent | Model | Tokens (24h) | Est. Cost | Status |
|-------|-------|-------------|-----------|--------|
| Central | Opus 4.6 | 125K | $1.87 | ⚠️ High |
| Techops | Opus 4.6 | 89K | $1.33 | ✅ Normal |
| Atlas | Sonnet 4.5 | 45K | $0.27 | ✅ Low |
| Closer | Haiku 4.5 | 23K | $0.02 | ✅ Minimal |
| Heartbeats | Ollama | 12K | $0.00 | ✅ Free |

### Summary
- **Total 24h:** 294K tokens (~$3.49)
- **Projected weekly:** ~$24.43
- **Budget:** $20/week → ⚠️ 122% projected

### Recommendations
1. Move Techops from Opus → Sonnet for routine tasks (-40% cost)
2. Increase heartbeat interval from 15m → 30m
3. Enable context pruning on Atlas (idle sessions burning cache)

Model Cost Reference

Use these rates for estimation (as of 2026):

Anthropic (Claude OAuth / API)

Free Options

*Free tier with rate limits

Optimization Playbook

Quick Wins (Do These First)

1. Heartbeats on Ollama

{ "heartbeat": { "model": "ollama/llama3.2:3b" } }

Saves: 100% of heartbeat costs (can be $5-10/week with Opus)

2. Haiku Cache Retention Off

{ "anthropic/claude-haiku-4-5": { "params": { "cacheRetention": "none" } } }

Saves: Cache write costs on cheap model (not worth caching)

3. Context Pruning

{ "contextPruning": { "mode": "cache-ttl", "ttl": "5m" } }

Saves: Stale context re-reads on every turn

4. Opus/Sonnet Cache Retention Long

{ "anthropic/claude-opus-4-6": { "params": { "cacheRetention": "long" } } }

Saves: Re-sending system prompt every turn (biggest single saving)

Model Tiering (Biggest Impact)

Session Management

• Daily reset: Sessions auto-clear at a set hour (reduces token accumulation)

{ "session": { "reset": { "mode": "daily", "atHour": 4, "idleMinutes": 45 } } }

• Memory flush: Save important context before compaction

{ "compaction": { "memoryFlush": { "enabled": true } } }

Alert Thresholds

Decision Rules

Apply these rules when generating a cost report:

Default Budget Configuration

Store in memory (or agent AGENTS.md) and reference when generating reports:

## Budget Alerts
- Daily budget: $5.00 (warn at 80% = $4.00)
- Weekly budget: $20.00 (warn at 70% = $14.00)
- Per-agent daily max: $2.00
- Alert channel: Telegram DM

Adjust these thresholds per-deployment in the monitoring agent's memory file.

Durable Output

When running as a cron job or generating a formal report, write the output to a file in addition to sending it to chat:

REPORT_DIR=$WORKSPACE/memory/cost-reports
mkdir -p "$REPORT_DIR"
REPORT_FILE="$REPORT_DIR/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).md"
# Write the formatted report to $REPORT_FILE

Reference path: $WORKSPACE/memory/cost-reports/YYYY-MM-DD.md

This allows the principal to review historical cost trends and gives the agent a durable record for pattern detection.

Integration with DevOps Agent

If you have a DevOps/monitoring agent (e.g. your DevOps agent), add to its AGENTS.md:

## Cost Monitoring
- Run daily cost report at 20:00
- Alert if any agent exceeds $2/day
- Weekly summary every Monday 09:00
- Track trends: is usage going up or down?

FAQ

Q: Does this skill make API calls? A: No. It uses OpenClaw's built-in session_status tool. No external APIs, no additional costs.

Q: How accurate are cost estimates? A: Based on published model pricing. Actual costs may vary with caching hits. Estimates are conservative (slightly high).

Q: Can I track costs per conversation? A: Not directly. Costs are tracked per session. Use sessions_list to see per-session token counts.

Q: Works with non-Anthropic models? A: Yes. Token counts work for all providers. Cost estimation requires known pricing (add custom rates in the cost reference section).

Changelog

v1.1.0

• Generalized all agent names in examples
• No specific setup references

v1.0.0

• Initial release