Awesome AI Tokenomics 
A curated list of tools, benchmarks, papers, and copy-paste configs for AI token costs: what tokens cost, where they get wasted, and how to cut the bill.
Every entry is a link with a one-line summary: what it does, and the number behind it. On top of the list sit a few short pages written here: practices (what to do), concepts (how the economics work), claims (what we currently believe, with the evidence), and setups (configs you can paste straight into Claude Code or Codex). It's a reference to browse, grep, or hand to your agent - not a product.
"I feel nervous when I have subscription left over. That just means I haven't maximized my token throughput." Andrej Karpathy, No Priors (2026)
Topics: Caching · Compression · Context engineering · Memory · Routing · Multi-agent systems · Gateways · Observability · Benchmarks · Cache accounting · Budgets · Pricing models · Energy
Contents
- Where to start
- Legend
- Monitor
- Optimize
- Govern
- Understand
- Measure
- Practices
- Concepts
- Claims
- Setups and skills
- Related lists
Where to start
Just want the numbers: the five area sections below hold every entry. Want the method: read the practices first, then the concepts behind them. Building something: setups and skills holds runnable configurations.
Legend
Each entry ends with a kind badge: 
Monitor
Dashboards
- ccusage - An open-source CLI that reads local agent logs to report token usage and cost across 15 coding-agent sources, with caching-aware pricing.
- Claude Code Usage Monitor - A live terminal dashboard for Claude Code usage, with burn-rate analytics, P90 limit detection, and session-expiry forecasts.
- claude-usage - A local dashboard for Claude Code token usage, costs, and session history; Pro and Max subscribers get a quota progress bar.
- ClaudeBar - A macOS menu-bar app that monitors AI coding quotas across 11 providers; the README declares MIT but ships no license file, so the OSS grant is unconfirmed.
- CodeBurn - An open-source tracker for 36 coding tools whose optimize command flags named harness-waste patterns with dollar estimates it later checks against actuals.
- Codex Usage Tracker - A local-first dashboard, CLI, and MCP tools indexing Codex CLI logs into SQLite to show where tokens, credits, and cost go, including cache ratios.
- CodexBar - A free, open-source macOS menu-bar app that shows limits and reset timers at a glance across dozens of AI providers, plus credit balances and spending.
- CodeZeno Usage Monitor - A Windows taskbar widget showing real-time Claude Code quota and usage at a glance, without opening a terminal.
- Datadog LLM Observability - Cost - Datadog's LLM Observability estimates per-request cost across 800+ models from token counts and public pricing; invoice reconciliation is a separate product.
- gh-aw (GitHub Agentic Workflows) - GitHub's agentic-workflows runtime with first-party per-run token and cost metering, plus budget caps that stop a workflow mid-run.
- Grafana Cloud GenAI Observability - Grafana Cloud's GenAI Observability ships a prebuilt dashboard for LLM cost, token usage, and latency, built on top of the OpenLIT SDK.
- OpenLIT - An open-source (Apache-2.0), OpenTelemetry-native platform with a self-hosted dashboard for LLM cost, token, and latency observability.
- OpenUsage - A native Swift macOS menu-bar meter for 10 AI coding subscriptions, showing session and weekly limits, credits, and estimated spend from local credentials.
- TokenTracker - A local-first token and cost dashboard for 27 coding tools, with a desktop pet, native widgets, and achievements as a distinct gamified take on usage metering.
eBPF Kernel Capture
- AgentSight - Uses eBPF to watch an AI agent from the kernel boundary, correlating what it said it would do with what it did, with under 3% overhead.
- OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) - GenAI / MCP - OBI is OpenTelemetry's zero-code eBPF instrumentation (formerly Grafana Beyla) that captures GenAI and MCP traces at the kernel layer with no SDK.
Observability
- Langfuse - An open-source platform for tracing, evaluating, and analyzing LLM and agent transcripts, with a prompt-management layer on top.
OTel for LLMs
- OpenLLMetry - An open-source set of OpenTelemetry-based SDKs and instrumentations, built by Traceloop, for LLM apps.
- OpenTelemetry GenAI Semantic Conventions - OpenTelemetry's GenAI Semantic Conventions define the vendor-neutral token, cost, and cache attribute names that OpenLLMetry and Phoenix both converge on.
Tracing
- Arize Phoenix - A source-available (Elastic License 2.0) LLM tracing platform recording per-span token counts and USD cost via OpenTelemetry.
- [claude-tap](http
