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Costs and Budgets

Baton tracks every token spent by every agent and enforces budget limits to prevent runaway costs.

Watch spend before it becomes a problem

The Costs page turns usage into an operator-facing budget view.

Costs page showing company totals plus per-agent and per-project spend breakdowns.
Compare company totals first, then check whether spend is concentrated in a single agent or project.
  1. 1

    Company total

    Start with the overall spend so you know whether the company is on track.

  2. 2

    80% warning

    Use the soft alert to decide whether to slow down, re-prioritize, or raise a budget.

  3. 3

    Per-agent split

    Check whether cost is concentrated in one agent or spread across projects.

How Cost Tracking Works​

Each agent heartbeat reports cost events with:

  • Provider — which LLM provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.)
  • Model — which model was used
  • Input tokens — tokens sent to the model
  • Output tokens — tokens generated by the model
  • Cost in cents — the dollar cost of the invocation

These are aggregated per agent per month (UTC calendar month).

Setting Budgets​

Company Budget​

Set an overall monthly budget for the company:

PATCH /api/companies/{companyId}
{ "budgetMonthlyCents": 100000 }

Per-Agent Budget​

Set individual agent budgets from the agent configuration page or API:

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

Budget Enforcement​

Baton enforces budgets automatically:

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

An auto-paused agent can be resumed by increasing its budget or waiting for the next calendar month.

Viewing Costs​

Dashboard​

The dashboard shows current month spend vs budget for the company and each agent.

Cost Breakdown API​

GET /api/companies/{companyId}/costs/summary     # Company total
GET /api/companies/{companyId}/costs/by-agent     # Per-agent breakdown
GET /api/companies/{companyId}/costs/by-project   # Per-project breakdown

Best Practices​

  • Set conservative budgets initially and increase as you see results
  • Monitor the dashboard regularly for unexpected cost spikes
  • Use per-agent budgets to limit exposure from any single agent
  • Critical agents (CEO, CTO) may need higher budgets than ICs