Skip to main content
Operator

Costs & Budgets

SLAW tracks every token spent by every agent and enforces budget limits, so a runaway agent can't run up an unbounded bill. Set a monthly cap; when an agent hits it, it stops.

The Costs page — inference spend, budget, finance ledger, and per-agent breakdown

How cost tracking works​

Each agent heartbeat reports a cost event with:

  • Provider — the LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, and others)
  • Model — the model used
  • Input tokens — tokens sent to the model
  • Output tokens — tokens generated
  • Cost in cents — the dollar cost of the invocation

These aggregate per agent, per UTC calendar month.

Setting budgets​

Squad budget​

Set an overall monthly budget for the squad:

PATCH /api/squads/{squadId}/budgets
{ "budgetMonthlyCents": 100000 }

Per-agent budget​

Set an individual agent's budget from its configuration page or the API:

PATCH /api/agents/{agentId}/budgets
{ "budgetMonthlyCents": 5000 }

Budget enforcement​

SLAW enforces budgets automatically:

ThresholdAction
80%Soft alert — the agent is warned to focus on critical tasks only
100%Hard stop — the agent is auto-paused; no more heartbeats

An auto-paused agent resumes only when you raise its budget above current spend. The pause is a persistent state — it does not auto-resume at the start of a new calendar month, even though spend tracking resets each UTC month.

Viewing costs​

The dashboard shows current-month spend versus budget for the squad and each agent. For breakdowns:

GET /api/squads/{squadId}/costs/summary      # Squad total
GET /api/squads/{squadId}/costs/by-agent     # Per-agent breakdown
GET /api/squads/{squadId}/costs/by-project   # Per-project breakdown

See the costs API reference.

Best practices​

  • Set conservative budgets initially and raise them as you see results.
  • Watch the dashboard for unexpected spikes.
  • Use per-agent budgets to limit exposure from any single agent.
  • Critical agents (the Squad Lead, for example) may need higher budgets than individual contributors.

Next steps​