The Hidden Cost of AI Coding Agents (And How to Track It in Real Time)

Last month I hit a wall. Not a coding wall — a billing wall. I’d been using Claude Code heavily for a side project, letting it refactor modules, write tests, and scaffold new features. Cursor was open in another window doing its thing. GitHub Copilot was autocompleting in my terminal. Life was good. Then the invoice arrived: $147 in API costs for a single month. On a project that hasn’t made a dollar yet. I wasn’t shocked that AI coding tools cost money. I was shocked that I had zero visibility into where that money was going while it was happening. The Silent Token Burn Here’s the thing nobody talks about when recommending AI coding agents: they consume tokens constantly, and most of them don’t tell you how many. Let’s break down what’s actually happening: Claude Code charges per token through Anthropic’s API. A heavy coding session can easily burn through 100K+ tokens. At current rates, that’s roughly $0.75-$3.00 per session depending on the model. Cursor uses a credit system, but on