Argos Budget Guardian

Real-time cost tracking and budget enforcement for the Claude Agent SDK

Named after Argos Panoptes — the all-seeing giant of Greek mythology with 100 eyes who never slept — because this tool watches every token, every tool call, every dollar.

The Problem

AI agents built with the Claude Agent SDK can spiral in cost — retrying, looping, spawning subagents — with no way to set limits or see spending in real time. Cost unpredictability is the #1 developer complaint in the AI agent ecosystem. There's no open-source tool that prevents overspend in real time for Claude Agent SDK.

Argos Budget Guardian fills this gap.

Features

• Real-time cost tracking per query, session, and daily
• Budget enforcement that actually stops agents before you overspend
• Live terminal dashboard showing costs as they happen
• Natural language budgets ("spend no more than $5 today")
• Drop-in wrapper — 2 lines to add to existing code
• Works with your hooks — merges with existing SDK hooks
• CLI tools for monitoring, history, and configuration
• Accessible for both developers and non-technical team leads

Quick Start

pip install argos-budget-guardian

from argos_budget_guardian import guarded_query

async for msg in guarded_query("Refactor the auth module", budget=5.0):
    print(msg)
# Prints cost summary automatically at the end

Usage

With GuardedAgent (recommended)

from argos_budget_guardian import GuardedAgent

async with GuardedAgent(budget=10.0, dashboard=True) as agent:
    async for msg in agent.query("Analyze and fix all bugs in src/"):
        pass  # Dashboard shows live costs

    print(f"Total: ${agent.total_cost:.4f}")
    print(f"Remaining: ${agent.budget_remaining:.4f}")
    print(agent.cost_report())

Natural language budget

from argos_budget_guardian import GuardedAgent

async with GuardedAgent(budget="spend no more than $5 today") as agent:
    async for msg in agent.query("..."):
        pass

Custom policy

from argos_budget_guardian import GuardedAgent, BudgetPolicy

policy = BudgetPolicy(
    max_cost_usd=20.0,
    warn_at_percent=70,
    action_on_limit="pause",
    cooldown_seconds=5,
    scope="daily",
)

async with GuardedAgent(budget=policy) as agent:
    async for msg in agent.query("..."):
        pass

With existing SDK options

from claude_agent_sdk import ClaudeAgentOptions, HookMatcher
from argos_budget_guardian import GuardedAgent

options = ClaudeAgentOptions(
    model="sonnet",
    permission_mode="acceptEdits",
    allowed_tools=["Read", "Write", "Bash"],
    hooks={
        "PreToolUse": [HookMatcher(matcher="Bash", hooks=[my_custom_hook])]
    }
)

# Guardian merges its hooks with yours — yours still run
async with GuardedAgent(budget=5.0, options=options) as agent:
    async for msg in agent.query("..."):
        pass

Callbacks for alerts

from argos_budget_guardian import GuardedAgent

def on_warn(current: float, limit: float):
    slack.post(f"Agent at {current/limit*100:.0f}% of budget")

def on_limit(current: float, limit: float):
    slack.post(f"Agent budget exhausted: ${current:.2f}")

async with GuardedAgent(
    budget=50.0,
    on_warning=on_warn,
    on_limit=on_limit,
) as agent:
    async for msg in agent.query("..."):
        pass

CLI

argos setup       # Interactive configuration wizard
argos status      # Current running session costs
argos history     # Past session cost history
argos dashboard   # Launch live terminal dashboard
argos config      # View or edit configuration
argos export      # Export cost history to CSV/JSON

Dashboard

+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|  Argos Budget Guardian                    SESSION ACTIVE   |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
|  Current Cost:  $0.4230                                    |
|  Budget: ################..........  42% of $1.00          |
|                                                            |
|  Cost by Model          |  Recent Tool Calls               |
|  sonnet-4.6  $0.38 90%  |  14:32 Write   $0.045           |
|  haiku-4.5   $0.04 10%  |  14:31 Bash    $0.012           |
|                          |  14:31 Read    $0.003           |
|                                                            |
|  Tokens: 12,450 in / 3,200 out / 8,100 cached             |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+

API Reference

GuardedAgent

BudgetPolicy

guarded_query()

Drop-in replacement for claude_agent_sdk.query() with budget enforcement.

async for msg in guarded_query(prompt, budget=5.0, options=None):
    ...

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

License

MIT