claude-agent-ledger

See exactly where your Claude Code budget goes — per subagent, per model, per day.

Even I needed --anonymize before posting my own data publicly. That's why the flag exists. Use it before you screenshot.

Why

Claude Code's invoice at month-end tells you one number. It doesn't tell you:

• Which of your subagents burned most of it
• Which model (Opus / Sonnet / Haiku) ate the budget
• Which day of last week was the expensive one
• Whether your "cheap" Haiku agent is actually quietly expensive

If you run one Claude Code session, this is fine — you already know. If you run seven subagents daily (reliability, release, review, iOS factory, docs, ...), you're flying blind.

claude-agent-ledger reads Claude Code's local session logs and gives you a per-subagent ledger. That's it.

Install

npm install -g claude-agent-ledger
# or: bun install -g claude-agent-ledger

agent-ledger week --summary        # the dashboard (start here)
agent-ledger week --tree           # subagent fan-out tree (the MOAT view) — new in 0.5
agent-ledger week --by tool        # which tool ate the budget (Read/Bash/Grep/MCP) — new in 0.5
agent-ledger week --by model       # opus vs sonnet vs haiku
agent-ledger week --by project     # which project ate your tokens
agent-ledger week --by session     # which single sessions went sideways
agent-ledger week --by day         # daily bar chart with peak/avg/variance
agent-ledger today --budget 50     # CI gate: exit 2 if today > $50 — new in 0.5
agent-ledger week --json | jq      # JSON output for ANY view incl. summary — new in 0.5
agent-ledger month --md > report.md

# Live tail — polling delta meter — new in 0.7
agent-ledger watch                          # refresh every 10s
agent-ledger watch 4                        # refresh every 4s

# Root-cause analysis on a single expensive session — new in 0.6
agent-ledger explain <session-id>           # heuristic: top-3 turns + tool/model breakdown
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... agent-ledger explain <session-id>
                                            # LLM mode: Haiku 4.5 ≤4-bullet root cause (~$0.001/run)

No server. No account. No data leaves your machine.

Why this and not /cost?

Claude Code's built-in /cost shows the current session cost. That's it.

claude-agent-ledger answers questions /cost can't:

• Which of my 10+ subagents burned the budget? (default)
• Which Claude model burned the budget — Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku? (--by model)
• Which project in ~/.claude/projects/ ate the tokens? (--by project)
• Which single sessions went sideways and burned $X? (--by session)
• Which day of last week was the expensive one? (--by day)
• What would my Claude Max usage have cost on pay-as-you-go? (the "shadow cost" framing)
• Is my cache reuse ratio healthy? (auto-derived insight)
• What's the leverage I'm getting from my $200/mo subscription? (e.g. 250×)

Run agent-ledger week --summary once and decide.

Example output (real, from the author's machine)

--summary (the dashboard)

agent-ledger week summary  2026-04-15 → 2026-04-22

  Shadow cost           $13,450.05
  Sessions              219
  Projects              9
  Plan reference        $200/mo (Max)
  Multiplier            252× vs Max plan

  Top subagent          (main)            $12,787.19 (95%)
  Top model             claude-opus-4-7   $7,278.87 (54%)
  Top project           ~/clawbot         $6,657.93 (50%)
  Peak day              2026-04-15        $3,679.16

  Project mix
    ~/clawbot                      $6,657.93 (50%)
    ~/clawbot-work                 $4,433.32 (33%)
    ~/ZStack-zstack-workspace      $1,890.02 (14%)

  Cache 1h writes       119.65M tokens · $3589.46
  Cache reads           5.59B tokens · $8236.15
  Cache reuse           38× reads/writes
  Server tools          none

Default — by subagent

agent-ledger week · 2026-04-14 → 2026-04-21

  subagent              sess      tokens(in/out)         cache tokens (1h/5m/read)       cost
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  (main)                  28       514K / 15.87M  1h:116.10M 5m:      0 r:5229.48M  $12524.97
  general-purpose        148         113K / 955K  1h:      0 5m: 20.67M r: 183.94M    $599.97
  Swift Developer         13           4K / 574K  1h:      0 5m:  1.61M r:  47.55M     $28.93
  Market Researcher       10          107K / 74K  1h:      0 5m:   863K r:   8.61M      $7.26
  Explore                 13          176K / 77K  1h:      0 5m:  2.60M r:  22.38M      $6.47
  zstackws                 3           232 / 20K  1h:      0 5m:   829K r:   3.52M      $4.47
  claude-code-guide        1             2K / 2K  1h:      0 5m:    56K r:    223K      $0.08
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  total                  216       916K / 17.57M  1h:116.10M 5m: 26.62M r:5495.71M  $13172.14

--by model

  subagent              sess      tokens(in/out)         cache tokens (1h/5m/read)       cost
  ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  claude-opus-4-7         16        59K / 8.35M   1h: 61.15M 5m:  2.32M r:2974.59M   $6967.29
  claude-opus-4-6        127       544K / 8.25M   1h: 55.02M 5m: 13.30M r:2422.18M   $6160.46
  claude-sonnet-4-6       65        135K / 946K   1h:      0 5m:  8.81M r:  98.12M     $77.07
  claude-haiku-4-5        13        178K /  67K   1h:      0 5m:  2.19M r:  21.57M      $4.33

--by day (ASCII bar chart)

  2026-04-15   $3749.84  ████████████████████████████████████ (18 sess)
  2026-04-16   $2492.99  ████████████████████████             (175 sess)
  2026-04-17   $2111.63  ████████████████████                 (9 sess)
  2026-04-18   $1840.02  ██████████████████                   (18 sess)
  2026-04-19    $644.97  ██████                               (5 sess)
  2026-04-20   $1095.58  ███████████                          (6 sess)
  2026-04-21   $1273.55  ████████████                         (9 sess)

Yes those are real numbers. Yes it's a lot. See Shadow cost vs actual bill.

Shadow cost vs actual bill

The cost column shows what you would pay at Anthropic's pay-as-you-go API rates.

If you're on a fixed-price subscription (Claude Pro / Max / Claude Code plan), your actual bill is capped — the shadow cost is what the same usage would have cost through the raw API. Useful for:

• Understanding where time-and-token budget goes, regardless of how you pay
• Spotting runaway agents (a 10× spike is still a 10× spike, capped or not)
• Deciding when to downshift to Haiku or up to Opus per task
• Justifying a Max subscription internally ("our shadow cost is $13K/wk, Max is $200/mo — that's a 65× discount")

If you're on pay-as-you-go, the cost column is roughly your bill (±5–10% depending on tier / geography / server_tool_use calibration).

How it works

Claude Code writes every conversation turn to ~/.claude/projects/<encoded-path>/*.jsonl. Each turn records input/output tokens, cache tokens (with TTL split), the model used, and any server_tool_use (web_search / web_fetch) requests. Subagent invocations live under <session>/subagents/agent-*.jsonl, with a sidecar .meta.json carrying the real subagent name (e.g. Reality Checker, ios-factory).

claude-agent-ledger walks the tree, resolves subagent types from the sidecar metadata, and aggregates by your chosen key (subagent, model, or day). Pricing is applied locally from src/pricing.ts. Nothing is sent anywhere — the tool never touches the network after install.

Cache accounting

Anthropic's prompt caching has two TTLs in current logs:

| Bucket | Multiplier | Notes | |---|---|---| | ephemeral_5m_input_tokens | 1.25× base input | 5-minute TTL (default) | | ephemeral_1h_input_tokens | 2.00× base input | 1-hour TTL (long-lived sessions) | | cache_read_input_tokens | 0.10× base input | Read price (90% discount, TTL-agnostic) |

Naive trackers lump these together as "input" and either overstate (by counting all creation as 1.25×) or understate (by ignoring the 1-hour writes entirely). claude-agent-ledger breaks them out explicitly — see src/pricing.ts.

Server tool pricing

web_search_requests and web_fetch_requests are counted at $0.01/request and shown in a footer when present:

  server tools: web_search ×7, web_fetch ×0  ($0.07)

If Anthropic's actual rate differs (or web_fetch has its own price), open an issue.

Flags

| Flag | What it does | |---|---| | --summary | One-screen dashboard with all the headline numbers | | --by <subagent\|model\|day\|project\|session> | Group rows. Default: subagent. day renders as ASCII bar chart. | | --anonymize | Replace project paths and session ids with ~/repo-A, sess-A, ... so you can share screenshots without doxing your employer / private repos. | | --md | Markdown table output (good for committing or sharing) | | --json | Raw JSON output (pipe into jq) | | --plan pro\|max | Hide dollar columns; show token utilization only |

| Env | What it does | |---|---| | NO_COLOR=1 | Disable ANSI colors | | FORCE_COLOR=1 | Force ANSI colors when piping |

What it's not

• Not a real-time dashboard (post-hoc log reader)
• Not a tracker for direct Anthropic API calls (those logs live server-side)
• Not a cost-limiter or kill-switch (read-only, by design)
• Not affiliated with Anthropic

Who this is for

• You run ≥ 2 Claude Code subagents and genuinely don't know the per-agent split
• You're on Claude Max and want to know what your "free" usage is worth
• You're building AI Agent systems and want observability primitives, not vendor dashboards

Status

v0.2.0 shipped 2026-04-21. Validated on ~200K turns of real Claude Code logs. Pricing matches Anthropic published rates as of 2026-04-21. Shadow cost values may drift ±5-10% from Anthropic's actual invoice in edge cases (retries, tier bumps, server_tool_use calibration). Calibration PRs welcome — see issue templates.

• [x] Log parser (JSONL streaming, recursive subagent discovery)
• [x] Per-subagent aggregation
• [x] Per-model aggregation (--by model)
• [x] Per-day aggregation with bar chart (--by day)
• [x] Terminal table + Markdown + JSON output
• [x] ANSI color, TTY-aware
• [x] Cache 1h/5m TTL split pricing
• [x] --plan pro|max to mask shadow cost
• [x] server_tool_use pricing (web_search, web_fetch)
• [ ] Cost forecasting (trailing 7-day burn rate)
• [ ] Calibration against real Anthropic invoices
• [ ] Homebrew tap

Install from source

git clone https://github.com/XJM-free/claude-agent-ledger.git
cd claude-agent-ledger
bun install
bun link
agent-ledger today

Development

bun test           # 22 pass, 0 fail
bun run typecheck

Author

Built by @XJM-free while running seven production Claude Code subagents for infrastructure work. More context coming on the blog.

License

MIT.