Session Cost Tracker

claude-session-cost

A Claude Code plugin that tracks estimated per-session spend, reports it on demand, and (optionally) enforces budgets — warning at a soft limit and blocking tool calls at a hard limit.

## Session Spend

- **Session**: `d82e570a-...`
- **Estimated spend**: $2.95
- **Tool calls tracked**: 63

### Budget
- Soft limit: $5.00 (59% used)
- Hard limit: $25.00 (12% used)

Why

Claude Code's built-in /usage shows token usage for your account/plan, but there's no per-session running spend estimate you can query mid-session, and nothing that compares it to a budget you set. This plugin fills that gap with three small stdlib-only Python pieces:

1. A PostToolUse hook (scripts/cost-track.py) that accumulates an estimated cost per tool call into /tmp/claude-cost-{session_id}.json (atomic writes, 0600 permissions, fail-open — its own errors can never block your session).
2. A PreToolUse budget gate (scripts/budget-guard.py) that compares the running total against ~/.claude/budgets.json: warns Claude via a system message at the soft limit (deduplicated per $1), and blocks tool calls at the hard limit. Without a budgets.json it is a no-op, so installing the plugin never blocks anyone by surprise.
3. A /session-cost:report command that reads the cost files and renders the summary above.

Install

/plugin marketplace add ProjectOpenSea/claude-session-cost
/plugin install session-cost@claude-session-cost

Requires python3 on your PATH (any Python ≥ 3.9, stdlib only).

Usage

Command	What it does
/session-cost:report	Current session's estimated spend
/session-cost:report <session-id>	A specific session
/session-cost:report --all	Every tracked session, newest first
/session-cost:report --json	Machine-readable output

Budgets (optional)

Create ~/.claude/budgets.json to get headroom reporting:

{
  "default": {
    "session_soft_limit_usd": 5.0,
    "session_hard_limit_usd": 25.0
  },
  "projects": {
    "my-project": { "session_soft_limit_usd": 20.0 }
  }
}

Project overrides match the directory name under ~/code/<project> or ~/Code/<project>. A limit of 0 is valid — a zero hard limit blocks every tool call (useful as a kill switch). team_soft_limit_usd / team_hard_limit_usd aggregate across sessions sharing a CLAUDE_TEAM_NAME.

When you hit a hard limit, the gate denies tool calls with the reason on stderr; raise the limit in budgets.json or start a new session. The gate is fail-open: any error in the gate itself (corrupt config, unreadable cost file) allows the tool call rather than wedging your session.

How costs are computed — read this

• Primary path: transcript actuals. On every tool call the hook reads the new tail of the session transcript (transcript_path from hook stdin) and prices the ground-truth usage blocks from assistant entries — real input/output tokens, cache reads at ~0.1× and cache writes at ~1.25× (cache reads dominate input tokens in agentic sessions, so ignoring them makes estimates wildly wrong), at the actual model's published rates. Entries are deduplicated by requestId and the file is read incrementally via a stored byte offset, so the per-call overhead stays tiny.
• Fallback: per-tool averages. If no transcript is readable, the hook falls back to static per-tool token estimates priced at Opus-tier rates. The report labels which basis produced the number.
• Known gap: the transcript records usage as Claude Code writes it; the final API call of a turn may not be priced until the next tool call lands. Numbers are near-real-time, not to-the-cent live.
• "Current session" is the newest cost file. If multiple sessions run concurrently, the newest file can briefly belong to a sibling session — the report prints the file's mtime so you can tell.

Where state lives

{COST_DIR | CLAUDE_TMP_DIR | /tmp}/claude-cost-{session_id}.json — one small JSON file per session, owner-readable only (0600). On a multi-user host, note that filenames (session IDs) are visible to other users in /tmp; file contents are not. Files are not auto-pruned; they're tiny, but you can delete claude-cost-*.json freely.

If CLAUDE_TEAM_NAME is set in the environment, it's recorded in each cost file and the report shows a team-wide total across sessions sharing it.

Caveats / non-goals

• One writer per cost file. If another tool on your machine also writes claude-cost-{session_id}.json (e.g. a custom harness with its own PostToolUse cost hook), totals will mix and inflate. Disable the other writer or point this plugin elsewhere via COST_DIR.