Token usage monitor for AI coding agents with cost alerts
Built for Engineering teams using Claude Code or OpenCode.
“[front-page] Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k This started based off of a hunch. We usually use OpenCode, but were &#x…”
💰 Willingness to pay, in their words
“It's wild that people will continue to pay Anthropic when there's a better, faster model available for a tenth of the price.”
“"LGTM" That'll be $50 — please.”
The receipts — real demand
“[front-page] Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k This started based off of a hunch. We usually use OpenCode, but were 'forced' to use Claude Code for a while due to issues with Meridian. In that time, we saw the usage meter rise much, much more quickly than when using OpenCode. This was the initial anecdotal evidence, but we undertook this small study to collect empiri…”
Full dossier
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Every corroborating quote, the source receipts, and the community echo. One email, no payment.
Why this is a gap
Surfaced from a high-intensity complaint with clear willingness to pay and a specific, reachable audience.
The market
Engineering teams using Claude Code or OpenCode and concerned about token overspend. Zero search volume; demand is visible only in niche forums and engineering Slack channels, not broad market search.
Competition & the opening
Helicone, Langfuse, Portkey, Braintrust, Prismo, and open-source projects (coding_agent_usage_tracker) all provide LLM monitoring and cost tracking. A 9/10 score indicates an already-saturated monitoring space; the gap, if any, is AI coding agents specifically.
What's hard to build
Monitoring Claude Code and OpenCode requires instrumenting closed, proprietary integrations; neither Anthropic nor OpenAI publish detailed token flow telemetry for IDE plugins, forcing a new tool to reverse-engineer or request direct API access from the IDE vendor. Real-time cost alerts demand low-latency data pipelines and agreement from Anthropic/OpenAI to expose token counts.
Why now
AI coding agents (Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor) have opaque token spend; existing tools (Helicone, Langfuse) are engineering-heavy, not agent-native.
How you'd monetize
Freemium: free tier (100 agent runs tracked), $19/mo for cost alerts and spend b