AI Agent Token Cost Templates and Budget Ledger Kit

Five ready-to-use spreadsheet files and an operating guide that give you line-item visibility into every token your AI agent burns. The WOWHOW Context Budget Accounting (CABA) framework — an original WOWHOW taxonomy — assigns every token to one of seven named roles (SYS, CTX, HIS, ORC, TLR, OUT, AUD), so you can see exactly which part of your pipeline caused last Tuesday's cost spike. Built for engineers shipping production agents, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent systems on Claude, GPT-4o, or any token-priced model.

What You Get

• token-cost-tracker.csv — The core per-run ledger. Paste actual token counts from your provider's usage API, enter your budget figures, and the variance columns show you which roles overran and by how much. Includes two fully worked example runs (a Support Ticket Classifier and a Research Summarizer) so you can see the pattern immediately.
• per-run-budget-template.csv — A seven-section pre-flight form to fill in before a run starts. Covers run identity, model selection, token allocation by CABA role, hard cost ceiling calculation, cache strategy, and a risk-flag checklist. Forces you to declare a budget before you touch the API.
• multi-agent-ledger.csv — One row per agent step in a pipeline run. Tracks each agent by CABA role (ORCH, PLAN, EXEC, RTRV, VLDT, SYNTH, GATE), model, and step cost. Includes a fully worked 7-step Research Report Generator pipeline example showing how routing cheap models to ORCH/RTRV/GATE roles cuts the same pipeline's cost by roughly 5x versus running everything on Sonnet.
• ledger-guide.md — The complete CABA operating manual: full role taxonomy with diagnostic thresholds, a seven-step budget calculation workflow, a variance analysis playbook covering five common overrun patterns, the CABA Optimization Decision Matrix, model-tier assignment strategy, prompt caching math, and pseudocode hooks for pre-run budget checks and post-run ledger writes.
• README.md — Quick-start in five steps, model pricing reference table (June 2026), the CABA token role summary table, and the five most common cost overrun patterns with their fixes.

How to Use

1. Open per-run-budget-template.csv in any spreadsheet app and fill in Sections 1–6 before writing a single line of agent code. The risk-flag checklist in Section 6 catches unbounded retrieval, missing history truncation, and absent cost ceilings — the three most common bill-shock causes.
2. Run your agent. After it completes, copy the token counts from your provider's usage dashboard or API response into the Actual rows of token-cost-tracker.csv. The variance columns calculate automatically.
3. Read the variance. A CTX overrun above 50% means your retriever is flooding the context — add a hard top-k cap. An HIS overrun above 100% means history is not being truncated between sub-tasks. The ledger-guide.md variance playbook covers all five patterns.
4. For multi-agent pipelines, open multi-agent-ledger.csv and fill one row per agent step. Compare your EXEC and SYNTH roles (where expensive models belong) against your ORCH, RTRV, and GATE roles (where cheap models belong). The example pipeline in the file shows the math in full.
5. After three to five runs, use the weekly rollup section in the tracker to identify which pipeline and which role consistently overruns, and prioritize fixes using the CABA Optimization Decision Matrix in the guide.

Who This Is For

• Backend engineers who ship AI agents and get a monthly bill they cannot explain by component
• ML engineers building RAG pipelines where retrieval token counts vary unpredictably
• Technical leads setting per-pipeline cost budgets for a team running multiple agents in production
• Indie developers who need to price AI-powered features accurately and cannot afford open-ended token burn
• Anyone evaluating model tier decisions (Haiku vs Sonnet vs Opus) who wants attribution data rather than guesses

The CABA framework fills a gap that no provider dashboard covers: it names the roles that tokens play in your pipeline, not just the totals. Once every token has a role, budget overruns have a responsible party and a concrete fix. Find more AI toolkits in the WOWHOW product browse, and try the free AI tools for quick cost estimates and token calculations.