Archestra

Costs & Limits

Archestra records the cost of every model request from chat, agents, and the LLM Proxy. Use it to:

  • See spend by person, team, agent, app, and model.
  • Set budgets that block requests when spend reaches the limit.
  • See how much use your Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions cover.

Costs & Limits → Costs for the last 30 days: billed spend, subscription-covered use, requests, tokens, and daily cost and cache-savings charts

Track Spending

Costs shows the whole company's spend. My Usage shows each person their own.

Company Spend

Go to Costs & Limits → Costs and pick a timeframe. You need llmCost:read. The top shows billed spend, subscription use, requests, and tokens. Each section below answers one question:

SectionAnswersWatch out
LLM ProxyWhich key or app spent it?A shared key names no person. Requests with no known sign-in show as unknown.
PeopleWho uses AI the most?Subscription use bills $0, so compare requests and tokens. To see other people, you also need access to the member list.
AppsWhat did an app cost to build and run?When one chat built several apps, each app shows the chat's full cost. Savings are estimates.
SkillsWhat do turns with a skill cost?A turn's cost covers the whole conversation, so skills can overlap.

Team, agent, and model views are there too.

To tie proxy traffic to a person, use a credential that names one. See Authentication.

Your Own Usage

Click your name in the sidebar, then My Usage. It shows your billed spend, requests, tokens, and active days, by model and by client.

My Usage for the last 30 days: spend, requests, tokens, and active days, with the models and clients used

  • Where your tokens went splits fresh input, cache reads, cache writes, and output.
  • Costliest sessions lists your most expensive sessions.

Set a Budget

A limit blocks matching requests once spend reaches it. Requests run again when the limit resets, or when you raise it.

  1. Go to Costs & Limits → Limits and click Add Limit.
  2. Choose who it applies to: organization, team, user, agent, LLM Proxy, virtual key, or environment.
  3. Pick models, or All models.
  4. Enter Limit value ($), choose the Cleanup interval, and click Create limit.

The table shows each limit's use so far, and when it resets.

Costs & Limits → Limits, with monthly budgets for the organization, two teams, and the production environment

  • A budget for everyone: set a default per-user limit under Settings → LLM. A per-environment default replaces it in that environment. A user's own limit replaces both.
  • Resets: a rolling interval resets after the time passes. A calendar interval resets at the next day, week, or month. A week can start on Sunday or Monday. Changing the interval resets the current use.
  • Environment limits add up the agents in that environment. Agents with no environment do not count.
  • Subscription use never counts toward a limit.
  • A blocked request gets HTTP 402, with code: token_cost_limit_exceeded. The message says Archestra blocked it, not the provider. SDKs do not retry a 402.
  • Archestra checks before each request. The request that crosses the limit still runs, so spend can end a little above it.

Subscription vs Metered Cost

See what your Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions save. A developer on Claude Max runs Claude Code all day. That use bills $0, but Costs shows what the same tokens would cost at API prices. That figure is the saving.

Archestra tells the two apart from the credential on each request. You configure nothing:

CredentialCounted as
A Claude Pro or Max sign-in, such as Claude Code'sSubscription
A ChatGPT sign-in, from Codex or Connect on Model ProvidersSubscription
A SuperGrok sign-inSubscription
Any API key, including GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot sign-insMetered
  • Subscription use bills $0 and never counts toward a budget. Costs shows it as Subscription-covered.
  • A Claude subscription that runs into paid usage credits turns metered. Archestra reads this from Anthropic's response headers.
  • To count every new request as metered, set ARCHESTRA_LLM_COST_SUBSCRIPTION_AUTODETECT=false. Past requests keep their classification.

Where Token Prices Come From

Every cost uses the model's price. Archestra syncs input, output, and cache prices for known models. A model it does not know gets an estimated price. For a custom or self-hosted model, set the price yourself. See Model Pricing, Limits, and Modalities.

Prompt caching lowers the cost of a prompt that starts the same way each time. Costs and logs show the cache reads and writes the provider reports. Archestra adds cache points to its own chat and agent requests. Proxy requests keep the caller's own cache markers.

What to Know