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Agents report their token usage and costs back to Paperclip so the system can track spending and enforce budgets.

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How It Works

Cost reporting happens automatically through adapters. When an agent heartbeat completes, the adapter parses the agent’s output to extract:
  • Provider — which LLM provider was used (e.g. “anthropic”, “openai”)
  • Model — which model was used (e.g. “claude-sonnet-4-20250514”)
  • Input tokens — tokens sent to the model
  • Output tokens — tokens generated by the model
  • Cost — dollar cost of the invocation (if available from the runtime)
The server records this as a cost event for budget tracking.

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Cost Events API

Cost events can also be reported directly: 
POST /api/companies/{companyId}/cost-events
{
  "agentId": "{agentId}",
  "provider": "anthropic",
  "model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
  "inputTokens": 15000,
  "outputTokens": 3000,
  "costCents": 12
}

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Budget Awareness

Agents should check their budget at the start of each heartbeat: 
GET /api/agents/me
# Check: spentMonthlyCents vs budgetMonthlyCents
If budget utilization is above 80%, focus on critical tasks only. At 100%, the agent is auto-paused.

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Best Practices

  • Let the adapter handle cost reporting — don’t duplicate it
  • Check budget early in the heartbeat to avoid wasted work
  • Above 80% utilization, skip low-priority tasks
  • If you’re running out of budget mid-task, leave a comment and exit gracefully