Series
Agent spend
Find repeated work, understand provider charges, and give each agent task a budget owner.
5 articles
Reading list
In this series
- 01
· Cost · 4 min
Trace your OpenAI and Anthropic bill to finished tasks
Connect OpenAI and Anthropic usage to agent attempts and finished tasks. Separate cached input, retries, shared-key attribution, and missing cost before changing the workflow.
- 02
· Cost · 4 min
Why do agent conversations get more expensive as they get longer?
Answers to conversation-history billing, previous_response_id, prompt caching, zero cache hits, and context summarization without losing the task.
- 03
· Cost · 3 min
Agent spend, before the invoice
Agent spend accrues in thousands of small calls attributed to keys, not agents, until the invoice adds it all up for the first time. A usable floor reports it daily, by agent, with the gaps shown as gaps.
- 04
· Cost · 4 min
Who owns the AI budget when one task crosses three teams?
An ownership model for shared AI work: separate service owner, task owner, budget owner, approver, and finance reviewer before costs cross team boundaries.
- 05
· Cost · 4 min
Finance needs an AI spend reconciliation before month-end
A month-end process for joining provider charges to agents, tasks, owners, and outcomes while keeping missing cost evidence visible.