measuring-orchestration-cost
Installation
SKILL.md
Measuring Orchestration Cost
Overview
Two questions get confused. What did this run consume is measurable from disk. What would the alternative have cost was never run and is a counterfactual. Never let the second borrow the authority of the first.
First: does money even apply?
Before computing a single dollar, establish how the user is billed. Getting this wrong makes every figure that follows decorative.
| Billing | The right unit |
|---|---|
| Subscription (Pro, Max, Team seat) | Not dollars. The tokens are already paid for. Report token volume, the share that ran on premium models, and limits hit. |
| Per-token (API key, Bedrock, Vertex, Foundry, Console) | Dollars, priced from a rate card with a retrieval date. |
Claude Code's own docs: "Claude Max and Pro subscribers have usage included in their subscription, so the session cost figure isn't relevant for billing purposes." Quoting a dollar saving to a flat-rate subscriber is a number that appears on no bill.
Unknown billing? Ask, or lead with tokens — they are true either way.