Tab · Product
Costs
See where the money actually goes — vendor by vendor, before you sign the next renewal. Every vendor the project pays (Anthropic · OpenAI · Vercel · Stripe · others) with current spend band, pricing model, and the trigger that'd move us off it. Lives at .claude/brain/costs.md.
See it in motion
Where to find it
- Localhost:
/costs.html?repo=<id> - On disk:
.claude/brain/costs.md - Keyboard: ⌘ K then
costs - Sidebar: Product → Costs
What it does for you
A vendor table you can defend at a board meeting.Vendor · what it does · pricing model · current band · why we'd switch. One row per paid surface, refreshed when the invoice changes meaningfully.
Catches the renewal trap.Most over-spend is auto-renewal nobody read. Every row carries the renewal cadence and the next renewal date — the tab is the one place the future bill is visible before the email arrives.
Lined up with Telemetry & Billing outcomes.Costs is the static “what we pay for”; Telemetry + Billing outcomes are the live “what we actually spent.” Both should converge or one is wrong.
Configure
Nothing — hand-edit the markdown when a vendor is added, removed, or repriced. The HTML twin is auto-synced by npm run sync-brain.
Use it well
Before signing any new vendor: add the row first, then sign. Forces the “what triggers us to switch?” question while it's still cheap to leave. Quarterly: re-read the bands against the last invoice — if the band's wrong, update before the next planning window so budgets price correctly.