# Three kinds of dollar, each one marked > In seven days this machine spent $200.77 that a harness priced exactly, plus 3,177 million tokens no dollar figure covers. Tade never adds those together. Published 2026-09-28 · by The Tade project · tagged spend, cost. Published at https://tade.sh/blog/three-kinds-of-dollar-each-one-marked/ — part of https://tade.sh/blog/. --- Here is the whole problem in one line. A harness on a subscription reports what a turn *would have* cost an API, and nobody is charged it. Add that to the dollars somebody actually was charged and the total is fiction — in the direction that makes the tool look impressive. So Tade keeps three kinds of dollar apart, marks every figure with which kind it is, and refuses to turn a plan into money at all. This is what that looks like on the machine this site was built on, read on 28 September 2026: ```console $ tade spend --days 7 last 7 days elsewhere $200.77 132.7M tokens — tade — 2875.8M tokens 39d 8h tade-web — 301.3M tokens 5d 22h total $200.77 3309.8M tokens 45d 7h by harness pi $200.77 132.7M tokens 6h 59m claude-code — 3177.0M tokens 45d $200.77 priced by the harness, against its own catalog — and 3177.0M of these tokens nothing here could price, which no figure above covers ``` Two hundred dollars and three and a quarter billion tokens, and the second number is not the cause of the first. They are two different things that happened in the same week. (`elsewhere` is the bucket for turns belonging to no task — the orchestrator's own, and the window's.) ## Who priced it, and the three answers The harness that ran a turn is the only thing that knows what was charged, so its figure wins wherever it gives one. What differs is whether it *vouched* for it: | kind | what it is | how it is marked | | --- | --- | --- | | `exact` | the harness priced it against its own catalog | nothing | | `estimate` | the harness guessed at it | `~` | | `listed` | the harness prices nothing, so Tade priced the tokens | `≈` | A total may still add all three — somebody asking what the morning cost wants one number — but every surface that prints one also says what it is made of, and money nobody vouched for is marked in the column where it is read rather than in a footnote. The declaration is per harness, and it is short: ```ts pi: { provider: null, usd: 'exact' }, 'claude-code': { provider: 'anthropic', usd: 'none' }, codex: { provider: 'openai', usd: 'none' }, ``` `none` is the honest half of it. Codex counts tokens and never prices them, and a journal is full of turns whose harness said nothing at all. The alternative to filling that in is a money column with a hole in it and nothing saying so — which is why `ccusage` exists as a separate program. The hole is real; the answer is to price it here. > **A screen from Tade — `spend`.** Spend: every agent with its model, tokens, share, runtime and cost, how much of each subscription’s window is used and when it resets, and each project against its budget. > > Spend: every agent with its model, tokens, share, runtime and cost, a `~` on > any figure the harness only guessed at, and under PLAN what each subscription > has left — its own list, in no total above it. The figures in this screen are > Tade drawing one of its own test scenarios; the real ones are the report above. ## A subscription is not money `isMoney` decides this before anything reaches the price table, and it decides by the sign-in rather than by the number. A plan pays a flat fee. The tokens under it have no per-token cost at all, so there is nothing to price and nothing to total — and a harness's guess at what an API would have charged for them is money that means nothing being added to a figure that means something. In the report above that is the `—` beside `claude-code`, and 3,177.0M tokens behind it. That dash is not zero spend. It is **unknown spend**, and the two have to be told apart because a dollar budget cannot police it. So a token budget exists as well, and what any bucket holds that no dollar covers is kept beside the money — `tokensUnpriced` — because a bucket holding both reads as a complete figure with one agent's cost missing from it. What a plan has left is the other question entirely, and it is its own list: how much of each window is used and when it resets, never a dollar, never in a total. On that page pi says *cannot tell — is never told what a plan has left; it prices each turn instead*, which is the truthful answer rather than a blank. ## A price is a fact with a date on it Where a harness prices nothing, Tade prices the tokens from a table checked into the source, with the day it was read off the providers' own pages riding along with every figure it produces. Today that is `PRICES_TAKEN = '2026-09-27'`. It is **never fetched**. Three places were possible and two are worse: a network lookup breaks the rule that nothing on a timer touches the network, and makes every reader of an old journal ask the internet what last March cost. A price typed into the config by every user is a blank table on every machine nobody filled in. The cost of that choice is that it goes stale, which is exactly why the date is attached and why `config.prices` overrides any model without waiting for a release. Two details in the table matter more than they look: - **Four figures per model, not one.** Input, output, cache read and cache write. A cached prompt read back costs a tenth of a fresh one, and an agent's day is mostly cache reads — 3.1 billion of the 3.3 billion tokens above. Pricing a long run off the input rate alone overstates it several times over. - **A model the table has never heard of stays *unknown*.** An invented price would be indistinguishable from a real one on the page, and a wrong dollar figure is worse than a missing one. ## And the hours are two numbers, not one The same argument applies to time, which is where the first version of this was wrong. ```console 45d 7h is 168 runs added together, not elapsed time: agents at once each count their own hours, and each counts until it stopped, idle time included. At least 17h 49m of that was spent working — inside a turn, rather than sitting in a lane waiting to be read. 93 of these runs began before Tade wrote down when a turn starts, so what they spent working cannot be known — it is not nought. ``` Forty-five days of lane time in seven days of wall clock is the parallelism, stated as what it is. Wall clock answers how long an agent was *there*, which is what an agent sitting finished in its lane until somebody closes the window burns. Working time answers how long a model was actually working, which is what pairs with a cost. Both are true, they answer different questions, and reading one as the other is the mistake the sentence exists to prevent. `unknown` rather than nought, again: the journal is append-only, `turn_done` has always been written and `turn_started` has not, so 93 of those runs cannot say. A `0s` in that column would be a lie told four times a second. ## What this is worth Nothing, if the only question is *roughly how much am I spending*. Plenty, the first time somebody asks where $200 went and the answer has to survive being checked. The four claims in this post are each one file. `isMoney` and the three kinds are `packages/core/src/spend.ts`; the dated table is `packages/core/src/prices.ts`; the two clocks are `packages/core/src/runtime.ts`. The report above is `tade spend --days 7 --json` on any machine that has been running agents. ```sh npm i -g tade-sh ``` Tade is MIT, and free. What the agents cost is whatever your models cost — and [the repository](https://github.com/mujacica/tade) is where the arithmetic is.