📖About & Usage

About

Carol Cost Tracker is the financial lens on Carol's AI operations — it monitors how much API usage the ecosystem is consuming and what that costs. Every time an agent like Clara or Forge calls an external AI model, that interaction has a price tag. Carol Cost Tracker exists to make sure nobody is flying blind on spending. It captures usage data, breaks it down, and presents it in a way that helps the team understand where the money is going.

Owned by Midas, the organisation's Head of Finance, this app sits at the intersection of operational awareness and budget control. It complements Initiative Cost Tracker, which provides a monitoring dashboard, by focusing on the granular tracking side — recording individual API calls, tallying token counts, and attributing costs to specific agents or processes. The app runs on port 7070 and is restricted to admin-level access, since cost data is sensitive internal information.

Usage Patterns

Carol Cost Tracker is most useful during financial reviews and when investigating unexpected spikes in API spending. For example, if Midas notices that this month's AI costs have jumped 40%, they can open the tracker to drill into which agents or services drove the increase — perhaps a new batch process introduced by Forge is making far more model calls than anticipated. That insight feeds directly into decisions about optimising prompts, adjusting rate limits, or reallocating budget.

The app is also referenced during planning. Before greenlighting a new initiative, Midas or Rhea might check historical cost patterns to estimate how much a proposed feature will add to the monthly bill. In day-to-day operations, it serves as the quiet bookkeeper — always recording, ready when someone asks "how much did that cost us?"

🗂️Tabs & Screens

Tab inventory is being built — see CAROL-INI-077 step 7.

👤Owner

📚Recent initiatives

Initiatives that touched this app — a short summary each; open one for the full story.