The CostCompass Almanac
Field notes on tracking and forecasting what your AI and cloud stack costs — reading provider bills, spotting drift, and seeing your real month-to-date spend.
-
Why "Hello" Costs Thousands of Tokens
A one-word prompt to an AI coding agent can hide thousands of tokens: repository exploration, tool output, build logs, and accumulated session state.
-
Ponytail Is Asking the Right Question
Ponytail cut the code an AI wrote by half, but the bill by only a fifth. That gap — and the cost that lands months later — is the part worth talking about.
-
The Bill That Didn't Match
My app said I'd spent $12 on Gemini. The bill said $32. Chasing that gap down, and never being blindsided by a provider bill again, is why CostCompass exists.
-
Introducing the CostCompass Almanac
A field journal for what your AI and cloud stack actually costs — the numbers, the surprises, and why we're keeping ours out in the open.