Agent Cost Controller

Agent bills are the new cloud bills: nobody watches them until the invoice arrives. A single runaway agent loop can burn through a month's budget overnight, and "just use the cheap model" is not a strategy — it is a hope. This skill gives any agent team a cost discipline: per-task and per-project token budgets, intelligent model-tier routing (cheap models for drafts, strong models for judgment), burn-rate monitoring with alerts, and per-task cost attribution so you know exactly which workflows earn their keep.

To impose a measurable cost discipline on agent work: define budgets before runs start, route each subtask to the cheapest model tier that can do it well, track spend in real time against budget, alert before overruns (not after), and attribute every dollar to the task that spent it. The goal is not to spend less — it is to spend deliberately.

• When agent API bills are growing and nobody can say which workflows drive them.

• Before launching any recurring agent automation (hourly sweeps, nightly reports, always-on assistants).

• When choosing between model tiers for a pipeline — the skill produces the routing table with cost/quality trade-offs made explicit.

• When a runaway loop or retry storm has burned budget before and you need guardrails that prevent recurrence.

• When reporting agent ROI to leadership: cost attribution turns "the agents cost $X" into "workflow Y costs $Z per run and saves N hours."

• For one-off interactive sessions where the human is watching — budgets matter for autonomous and recurring work, not for a single chat.

• When you have no visibility into per-call token usage (no logging) — fix observability first; the skill will tell you what to instrument.

• As a substitute for prompt efficiency — if every call wastes 8k tokens of boilerplate, fix the prompts (the skill flags this, but it is not the skill's job).

• When quality is non-negotiable and the budget is genuinely unlimited — say so explicitly; the skill then optimizes for quality with cost visibility rather than cost control.