Introducing the CostCompass Almanac

Most of us found out what our AI stack costs the hard way: four browser tabs open at the end of the month, a calculator, and a quiet sense of dread. One bill from Anthropic. Another from OpenAI. A Vertex line item buried three clicks deep in a cloud console. A subscription or two you forgot you were paying for.

CostCompass exists to collapse that into a single, honest view. The Almanac — this blog — is where we’ll write down what we learn while building it: how providers meter usage, where the surprises hide, and how to forecast spend before it forecasts you.

We’ve started with a field guide on tracking Claude (Anthropic) costs — how token billing works, why month-end spend is hard to predict, and how to forecast it. More providers will follow.

What you can expect here

Short, practical entries. No growth-hacking, no ten-step funnels. When a provider changes how it bills, we’ll explain what moved and what it means for your monthly number. When we ship something in CostCompass worth knowing about, it’ll show up here first.

Why an almanac

An almanac is a record kept across seasons — tables, observations, the occasional hard-won rule of thumb. Spend has seasons too: the month you migrated models, the week a batch job ran hot, the quarter a subscription crept up. Writing it down is how you stop being surprised by the same thing twice.

Welcome aboard. Keep your bearings.