Tare

tare

Same work, fewer tokens, with the receipt.

Your coding agent keeps a log of every API call it makes. Tare reads those logs, prices every token, and shows where the money went: Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, and Cline, Roo Code and Kilo Code in VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf and the other VS Code-based editors. For Codex on a ChatGPT plan it also shows how close you came to the plan's usage limits. Then it cuts the waste without breaking the prompt cache, and proves each saving on your own work. It runs locally, uploads nothing and never calls a model.

npx tarelab

  YOUR AGENT, WRAPPED  · last 30 days · 254 sessions · 79,905 API calls
  $6,720 API-equivalent spend  $623 of it was avoidable (9%)
  Where it went  Reading cached context     ██████████████████████ $3,809  Writing to the cache       ████████████ $2,072  Output (thinking incl.)    █████ $838
  The highlights  › ~82k tokens load before you type a word.  › Coffee-break tax: $722 re-caching after 636 pauses.  › Sub-agents spent $2,734 (41%).

A real month of Priberry's own Claude Code use.

Commands

How the numbers work

• API-equivalent. Every call is priced at Anthropic's API list prices: fresh input, cache writes (1.25× input for the 5-minute cache, 2× for the 1-hour cache), cache reads and output. On a subscription you pay a flat fee; this is what the same work would cost on the API.
• Carry cost. A tool's output is written to the cache once and read back on every later call until the conversation is compacted. Tare charges each output for the whole time it stays in context.
• Cache rebuilds. When most of a prompt is written to the cache again instead of read from it, Tare says why: an idle pause past the cache's lifetime, a model switch, a compaction, or a break.
• Repeats. A tool call that returned byte-for-byte what the agent already had.

The fixes

Tare cuts waste where it enters the context and never rewrites what's already there, because a rewritten history breaks the prompt cache and costs more than it saves.

• Output trim (a PostToolUse hook on Bash): output over ~2,500 tokens is cut to the first 40 lines, every line that looks like a failure (with context) and the last 60 lines. The full output is saved in ~/.tare/out/ and the agent is told where.
• Cache countdown (the status line): how long until the cache goes cold, and what the next message costs warm versus cold. Installed only if you don't already have a status line.

Settings are backed up to ~/.tare/backups/ first, and tare fix --undo removes only Tare's entries.

The receipt

tare receipt compares cost per commit in sessions before and after the fixes, with a bootstrap 90% interval, and checks that as many sessions still reach a commit. With fewer than 8 finished sessions on either side it prints "not enough data" and no number.

In your agent

One command adds Tare to every AI coding app it finds: Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex, Gemini CLI, Kiro, opencode, Amazon Q, LM Studio, and Cline, Roo Code and Kilo Code. The entry is pinned to the exact version, each file is backed up first, and --undo removes it.

npx tarelab setup

Or one app at a time:

• Claude Code plugin: /plugin marketplace add priberry-data/tarelab, then /plugin install tare@priberry.
• Gemini CLI extension: gemini extensions install https://github.com/priberry-data/tarelab
• Skill (Claude Code or Codex): copy skills/tare into ~/.claude/skills/ or ~/.codex/skills/.
• Any MCP client: {"command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "[email protected]", "mcp"]}. Then ask "what did my agent cost this month?"

Limits

Tare reads the logs that agents keep on your machine. Cursor's own agent, Windsurf's Cascade, Copilot and the browser app builders (Lovable, Bolt, v0, Replit) keep usage on their servers, so Tare can't see them yet; opencode is next. Cline-family costs are the ones the extension itself recorded. The fix and receipt commands work on Claude Code, where the hooks exist. Token counts for tool output are estimated from text length (the API reports totals per call, not per block). Prices are as of 2026-10-06 for Anthropic and 2026-11-08 for OpenAI and Google, and live in src/prices.mjs.

Apache-2.0 · Built by Priberry, who also make Crumple.