Calculate cumulative token usage and cost across all Aider sessions

[stephane-klein]

Hello,

I searched for a solution to calculate the total cost spent on a whole project created with Aider (not just one session), from the content of the .aider.chat.history.md file present in a project.
I searched in the documentation and in the issues of the Aider repository without finding anything.

Question: Does this feature exist? Did I search badly?

In the meantime, I implemented with Sonnet 4.5 the following script: aider_cost_analyzer.py, which may be useful to some of you.

Installation on Fedora:

$ mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
$ curl -o ~/.local/bin/aider_cost_analyzer.py https://gist.githubusercontent.com/stephane-klein/3b3808c1b03b7e6ddfc4b22b69fdf776/raw/4262faec0cb2f468ea6b6d8751339b8e8497f005/aider_cost_analyzer.py
$ chmod +x ~/.local/bin/aider_cost_analyzer.py

Example of use:

$ aider_cost_analyzer.py .
Analyzing 1 history file(s) in '.':

.aider.chat.history.md:
  Messages: 30
  Tokens sent: 639,200 | received: 65,613
  Cost: $1.86

============================================================
Total tokens sent: 639,200
Total tokens received: 65,613
Total cost: $1.86

Question: Do you think this feature could be added directly in aider?
If yes, I will maybe try to suggest a pull request.

Best regards,
Stéphane

[ErichBSchulz]

I had some similar thoughts!

Would be good to define 2 log files:

Global (all repos) &
Local (just this repo)

Potentially loggable metrics:
’’’
Tokens in, out, cached
Time elapsed
Model
Path (for global log)
’’’

[dwash96]

It's important to keep in mind that the cost estimates usually don't take into account the prompt caching and that different models have different input/output costs so running this script in this way is only a semi-reliable estimator. It is probably going to be a higher estimate than ground truth (which is good!) if you use one primary model and switch to others sparingly. I am definitely down to memorialize this script in a the scripts/ directory since it could be useful to be able estimate this (with the above caveats) but it doesn't feel like run time functionality to me to be honest

[stephane-klein]

I saw commit ead5d08

However, I'm not sure how to use this feature with cecil. When I run cecil --help, I don't see any option to calculate the total cost spent on a whole project created with Aider (not just one session), based on the .aider.chat.history.md file.

Perhaps my objective wasn't clear when I opened #259. My proposal wasn't just to add my script to https://github.com/dwash96/aider-ce/tree/main/scripts (which is already good), but rather to expose a dedicated command like:

$ cecil --project-cost-analyzer
Analyzing 1 history file(s) in '.':

.aider.chat.history.md:
  Messages: 30
  Tokens sent: 639,200 | received: 65,613
  Cost: $1.86

============================================================
Total tokens sent: 639,200
Total tokens received: 65,613
Total cost: $1.86

This would make project-wide cost analysis easily accessible for any Aider project.

@dwash96, what do you think?

(I would like to reopen the issue).

[dwash96]

I gotcha, I've reopened it. I'll be refactoring commands more generally over the next couple of weeks and can add this either as s main command or an archetypal command plugin once the plugin system is stood up