agentcents 0.2.4

LLM API cost interceptor and budget enforcer for AI agents

agentcents

Stop overpaying for the wrong model.

agentcents sits between your agent and any LLM. Before each call it shows you the cheapest model that can actually do the job — priced live, ranked by real capability scores — and tracks every cent you spend. Point your client at it. Change nothing else.

pip install agentcents

No API keys. No accounts. No code changes beyond one base URL.

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The problem

Most agents pick one frontier model and use it for everything — classifying, retrieving, the hard reasoning step, the trivial cleanup step. The easy steps don't need a frontier model. You're paying Opus-4.8 prices to decide whether a message is a question or a complaint.

agentcents shows you, per step, what you pay and what you could pay — then routes each step to the cheapest model that clears the bar. In a typical 7-step task:

all-Opus-4.8 $0.114 → cost-routed $0.055 — 51% cheaper, keeping the flagship only where the work demands it.

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How it works

A local proxy sits between your agent and the LLM provider. You point at it; it does the rest — identifies each task (no tagging required), prices it against every current model, checks capability, and shows you the plan.

your agent  →  agentcents (localhost:8082)  →  any LLM provider

1. pip install agentcents — Python ≥ 3.9
2. agentcents start — the local proxy comes up on port 8082
3. Point your client at it (one base URL, or wrap your run — see below)
4. agentcents usage — see exactly where every cent went

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Quick start

Zero-config — wrap your run:

agentcents run -- python my_agent.py

agentcents sets the base URLs, groups the run into one session, and gets out of the way. Your agent code is untouched.

Or one env var:

export OPENAI_BASE_URL="http://localhost:8082/openai"
python my_agent.py

Or one line in code:

from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="http://localhost:8082/openai")
# everything else stays exactly the same

Already setting your own session or tag headers? agentcents recognizes the common ones (X-Session-ID, X-Request-ID, and more) automatically. The proxy adapts to your client — never the other way around.

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What the proxy does

It doesn't just log. It advises.

• Cost, before you spend. See a request's exact cost on every candidate model — fresh input, cached input, output — not a guess.
• Cheapest capable model, not just cheapest. Every candidate is ranked by a real capability score (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index) alongside its price, so the advice is "cheapest model that clears this step's bar," never "cheapest, quality be damned."
• Current models. Prices and capability sync from the providers and public leaderboards — Opus 4.8, Fable 5, GPT-5.6, Sonnet 5, Gemini — not last year's lineup.
• Your whole task as a plan. agentcents reconstructs the multi-step plan your agent actually ran and shows the cost of each node — like a query plan, for LLM calls.
• Local as a first-class option. Running Ollama? It's priced in (power cost, not $0), so you see exactly when local beats the cloud and when it doesn't.

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CLI

$ agentcents usage
─────────────────────────────────
Total spend (last 48h)   $3.42
  my-agent          $2.10   61%
  research-agent    $1.32   39%
─────────────────────────────────
Daily budget             $5.00
Remaining                $1.58

$ agentcents recent
claude-opus-4-8    512 tok   $0.013   my-agent
claude-sonnet-5    1.2k tok  $0.012   research-agent
gpt-5.6-terra      800 tok   $0.012   my-agent

Other commands: agentcents models, agentcents sync, agentcents agents, agentcents rolling, agentcents local, agentcents features.

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Supported providers

Anything that speaks the OpenAI or Anthropic format: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, and local Ollama. Pricing syncs automatically on proxy startup from public catalogs, with current frontier prices carried in a bundled config the aggregators lag on.

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Free vs Pro

Free forever — no account needed:

• Proxy + cost logging
• Exact-match cache
• Budget alerts + hard block
• Full CLI reporting
• Web dashboard
• Local Ollama tracking
• Cost advisor + frontier showdown (on demo data)

Pro — one-time license (agentcents activate <key>):

• Everything in Free
• Advisor + routing on your own traffic (which cheaper models actually clear the bar on your workload, learned from your real calls)
• Semantic similarity cache
• Multi-agent TUI dashboard + live call watch
• Auto-routing (swap mode)
• XGBoost cost predictor

For Pro dependencies: pip install 'agentcents[pro]'.

Get Pro: https://labhamfounder.gumroad.com/l/agentcents-pro

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License

agentcents is proprietary software, © Labham LLC. All rights reserved. The source is distributed for transparency and inspection; use is licensed, not sold. See LICENSE.txt for terms. Pro features require a valid license key.

Contact: [e-mail] · https://labham.com