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October 18, 2026
A plugin to keep track of what AI really costs
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Last week I wrote that a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT gives you the wrong picture of what AI costs. You pay a fixed fee, and that fee says nothing about what your usage is worth. Prices will go up, to the point where you have to be careful about what you let AI do and what you don't. So it pays to know what a prompt or a chat session actually costs.
To show where that money goes, I built an . But a model works with example questions, and you look at it once. Awareness needs something you see every day, about your own usage.
So I built a small plugin for Claude Code that keeps track of it while you work: token-cost. It shows what your usage would cost at API prices, live and per period, so the cost stays in view instead of disappearing behind a fixed fee.
How it works
After every turn, the status line shows what the current session would have cost at API prices, next to how much of your five-hour limit you have used. For example:
≈ $3.98 API value · 5h limit 23.5%
Whenever you want the bigger picture, /token-cost adds it all up, across every session on your machine. This is mine, on 18 October 2026:
| Period | Tokens | Responses |
|---|