📖About & Usage

About

Carol Cost Monitor is the internal cost ledger for Carol's virtual machine, tracking every penny spent on Claude API calls across the ecosystem. Think of it as the electricity meter for Carol's AI brain — it quietly records how much computational power each agent, app, and process consumes so the team can see where the budget goes. The app was introduced as part of the CAROL-INI-370 initiative (Phase 1) and is owned by Hagrid, who maintains the underlying infrastructure.

Unlike Azure Cost Tracker, which provides broader cost-tracking views, Carol Cost Monitor focuses specifically on raw Claude API usage at the VM level — the actual token counts, request volumes, and associated costs that accumulate as agents go about their work. It sits on port 7174 and is restricted to admin-level access, meaning only infrastructure and operations staff interact with it directly.

Usage Patterns

Carol Cost Monitor runs continuously in the background, logging API expenditure as it happens. A typical scenario: Merlin kicks off a large planning cycle that triggers dozens of agent conversations — Sage runs analyses, Forge generates code, Archon produces designs. Each of those interactions racks up Claude API costs. Carol Cost Monitor captures every call, so Midas and the operations team can later review spending patterns, spot unexpected spikes, and keep the overall budget on track.

The app is also useful during post-incident reviews. If a runaway process burns through an unusual number of API calls overnight, the cost ledger provides the receipts — which agent, which timeframe, how many tokens. This makes it a quiet but essential piece of Carol's self-awareness toolkit, helping the organisation understand the real-world cost of running an AI-driven company.

🗂️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.