Cost Guardian by Dexter Labs

Monitor and control OpenClaw API costs. Tracks token usage across all sessions, estimates spend by model, alerts on budget overruns, and recommends cheaper model routing for routine tasks. Use when: asking about costs, checking spend, setting budgets, or optimizing API usage.

Cost Guardian — OpenClaw Cost Monitor & Optimizer

Know what your agent costs. Before it becomes a problem.

When to Use

✅ USE this skill when:

• "How much am I spending?"
• "What's my API cost?"
• "Which sessions cost the most?"
• "Am I over budget?"
• "How can I reduce costs?"
• Setting up daily/weekly cost reports
• Optimizing model usage for crons and automated tasks

❌ DON'T use this skill for:

• Billing issues with Anthropic/OpenAI (contact providers directly)
• Managing API keys (use OpenClaw's secrets system)

Quick Start

Get a Cost Report (All Time)

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --all

Last 24 Hours

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --hours 24

With Budget Alert ($5/day)

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --budget 5.00

JSON Output (for dashboards)

bash

python3 scripts/cost-report.py --all --json

What It Reports

• Estimated cost by model and session
• Token breakdown — input, output, context (cached)
• Top spending sessions — find what's burning tokens
• Model efficiency — how much you'd save switching routine tasks to cheaper models
• Budget alerts — 🟡 at 80% and 🔴 when over budget
• Cron cost tracking — automated jobs often account for 30-50% of spend

Setting Up Automated Reports

Daily Cost Report via Cron

Tell your agent:

"Set up a daily cost report that runs at 8 AM and alerts me if I'm over $5/day"

The agent should create a cron job that:

1. Runs python3 <skill-dir>/scripts/cost-report.py --hours 24 --budget 5.00
2. Delivers the report via your preferred channel

Model Optimization

The report flags when expensive models (Opus) are being used for routine tasks that Sonnet handles fine:

• Email checking crons → Sonnet
• Heartbeat checks → Sonnet
• Site health monitoring → Sonnet or Haiku
• Complex reasoning, strategy, writing → Keep on Opus

Supported Models & Pricing

Model	Input $/1M	Output $/1M	Cache $/1M
Claude Opus 4	$15.00	$75.00	$1.875
Claude Sonnet 4	$3.00	$15.00	$0.30
Claude Haiku 3.5	$0.80	$4.00	$0.08
GPT-4o	$2.50	$10.00	$1.25
GPT-4.1	$2.00	$8.00	$0.50
GPT-4.1-mini	$0.40	$1.60	$0.10
GPT-4.1-nano	$0.10	$0.40	$0.025
OpenRouter/auto	~$3.00	~$15.00	~$0.30

Pricing is estimated and may vary. Update scripts/cost-report.py MODEL_PRICING dict for current rates.

Roadmap

• Auto model-switching recommendations per session type
• Historical trend tracking (daily/weekly/monthly)
• Cost anomaly detection (sudden spikes)
• Per-project cost allocation
• Web dashboard with charts