Tracking costs

The Costs dashboard is the source of truth for "what does ARDS cost me?". It pulls from the live token accounting every LLM call generates.

Billed vs. API-equivalent

The dashboard's headline idea: not all usage is billed. A call that ran on a flat-rate subscription credential (an Anthropic subscription, Synthetic.new) costs you nothing extra — but the dashboard still computes what it would have cost at API list prices, so you can see the real weight of your usage.

The Cost basis switch at the top of the page has three positions:

  • Billed — only dollars actually metered (API-key usage).
  • API-equivalent — the ≈$ value of everything, as if it had all been API-metered.
  • Both — the default: billed spend plus subscription-covered usage side by side.

The Cost Overview panel reflects the basis you picked, alongside total records and input/output token counts. A dedicated card, API-Equivalent (Covered by Subscription), carries the note "Not billed — this usage ran on the flat-rate subscription".

When subscription credentials are active, a Subscription Usage card also shows the provider's quota windows — session (5h) and week (7d) — with the percentage used and when each window resets.

What you see by default

The landing view shows the trailing 30 days. The filter bar offers:

  • Date range — 24h / 7d / 30d / All tabs, or a custom From / To range.
  • Provider — filter everything to one provider.

Below the overview, two panels split the spend:

  • Costs by Source — by what generated the call: coding_task, research, dialogue, mission_agent, workflow, email_content, search_synthesis, and so on. This is where you spot patterns like "research is 30 % of my total".
  • Costs by Model — by model, across providers.

Drilling down

Click a row in Costs by Source or Costs by Model to open a repartition drawer: a source's spend split by model (Repartition by model), or a model's spend split by source (Repartition by source).

There is no per-mission cost report. Instead, the Recent Cost Records table at the bottom lists individual records — timestamp, source, model, tokens, estimated cost — and each row links to the page that owns it: the coding task, the mission, the conversation. For per-call detail (the exact configuration and provenance of one LLM call), use the LLM Snapshots page.

What's free vs. metered

  • Subscription credentials (Anthropic subscription, Synthetic.new flat-rate) — not billed per call. Their usage shows up as API-equivalent ≈$ values and counts against the subscription's quota windows.
  • API-key credentials — metered per token. Every input and output token counts, at the provider's list price.

The dashboard shows public list prices. If your billing relationship gives you a discount, your actual invoice will be smaller than what the page reports.

Quotas and limits

Two surfaces keep you ahead of quota trouble:

  • The Rate Limit Events table on the Costs page lists recent rate-limit hits — timestamp, the task that hit the wall, provider, model, and when the limit resets.
  • The Quotas page shows each account's subscription quota windows with an Open / Shut until verdict per account. When an account's quota is exhausted, ARDS stops spawning new agent work on it until the window resets.

There is no hard spend limit: ARDS won't pause work because metered spend crossed a dollar threshold. If you want a guardrail, run on subscription credentials (flat-rate, can't surprise you) or set a monthly cap at your provider (Anthropic's console has one) — and watch the Costs page after big configuration changes.