Cost Guardian — OpenClaw Cost Monitor & Optimizer#

Know what your agent costs. Before it becomes a problem.

When to Use#

✅ USE this skill when:

• "How much am I spending?"
• "What's my API cost?"
• "Which sessions cost the most?"
• "Am I over budget?"
• "How can I reduce costs?"
• Setting up daily/weekly cost reports
• Optimizing model usage for crons and automated tasks

❌ DON'T use this skill for:

• Billing issues with Anthropic/OpenAI (contact providers directly)
• Managing API keys (use OpenClaw's secrets system)

Quick Start#

Get a Cost Report (All Time)#

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --all

Last 24 Hours#

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --hours 24

With Budget Alert ($5/day)#

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --budget 5.00

JSON Output (for dashboards)#

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --all --json

What It Reports#

• Estimated cost by model and session
• Token breakdown — input, output, context (cached)
• Top spending sessions — find what's burning tokens
• Model efficiency — how much you'd save switching routine tasks to cheaper models
• Budget alerts — 🟡 at 80% and 🔴 when over budget
• Cron cost tracking — automated jobs often account for 30-50% of spend

Setting Up Automated Reports#

Daily Cost Report via Cron#

Tell your agent:

"Set up a daily cost report that runs at 8 AM and alerts me if I'm over $5/day"

The agent should create a cron job that:

1. Runs python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/cost-report.py --hours 24 --budget 5.00
2. Delivers the report via your preferred channel

Model Optimization#

The report flags when expensive models (Opus) are being used for routine tasks that Sonnet handles fine:

• Email checking crons → Sonnet
• Heartbeat checks → Sonnet
• Site health monitoring → Sonnet or Haiku
• Complex reasoning, strategy, writing → Keep on Opus

Supported Models & Pricing#

ModelInput $/1MOutput $/1MCache $/1MClaude Opus 4$15.00$75.00$1.875Claude Sonnet 4$3.00$15.00$0.30Claude Haiku 3.5$0.80$4.00$0.08GPT-4o$2.50$10.00$1.25GPT-4.1$2.00$8.00$0.50GPT-4.1-mini$0.40$1.60$0.10GPT-4.1-nano$0.10$0.40$0.025OpenRouter/auto~$3.00~$15.00~$0.30

Pricing is estimated and may vary. Update scripts/cost-report.py MODEL_PRICING dict for current rates.

Roadmap#

• Auto model-switching recommendations per session type
• Historical trend tracking (daily/weekly/monthly)
• Cost anomaly detection (sudden spikes)
• Per-project cost allocation
• Web dashboard with charts