Frugal Tokens: Exploring Cost and Usage Across Coding Agents

Frugal Tokens: How to Track Coding Agent Cost and Usage Per Session

Frugal Tokens is a free, local, read-only web dashboard that shows exactly how many tokens each of your AI coding agent sessions consumed and what those tokens cost, across OpenCode, Claude Code, PI, Codex, and Cursor. It runs entirely on your machine, never mutates your agent databases, and surfaces hidden costs like prompt-cache misses that most developers never see. This guide walks you through installing it, pointing it at your agents, and reading the per-session explorer to cut your coding agent spend. ...

September 5, 2026 · 10 min · baeseokjae
Agent Token Cost Attribution Guide 2026

Agent Token Cost Attribution: A Practical Guide for 2026

Agentic coding tasks consume up to 1,000× more tokens than equivalent chat sessions, input tokens (not output) dominate the bill even with prompt caching enabled, and the same task can vary by 30× in total token consumption across runs with no correlation to output quality — yet most teams still have zero per-agent, per-feature cost attribution. Fixing that starts with tagging every LLM request at the SDK call site. Why Token Cost Attribution Matters More in 2026 Than Ever Enterprise GenAI spend hit $37B in 2025, up from $11.5B the year before. 80% of companies exceeded their AI cost forecasts by 25% or more (full breakdown). The old approach — a single API key for the whole team, one line item on the AWS bill — no longer works when agents are running unsupervised loops that burn 25,000–35,000 tokens per turn across 50-turn sessions. ...

June 19, 2026 · 12 min · baeseokjae