AgentBudget – Budget gates for coding agents

Give every coding-agent task a hard budget so you stop guessing where your quota went

Problem

Developers love Codex, Claude Code and Cursor, but the spend is opaque: users suspect regional subscriptions get quietly halved token quotas, others wonder whether a subscription is even needed just to learn vibe coding, and some build meta-tools to nudge themselves off over-using agents. Existing dashboards only show account-wide usage, never what a single task actually cost.

Solution

A local proxy/CLI wrapper that attaches budgets, step limits and time caps to every agent task, records per-call token use and estimated cost in real time, and pauses for confirmation when a threshold is crossed. A small local dashboard compares budget vs actual, and each task ends with a one-screen receipt of cost and output.

Users

Indie developers and power users juggling multiple Codex/Claude Code/Cursor accounts, plus tech leads who must justify agent ROI to management

MVP

Intercept and log agent API calls and tokens; per-project/session budget caps; pause-and-confirm on overrun; local CLI dashboard for history; one-click cost receipt export

Revenue

Free for one project; subscription unlocks multiple projects, custom budget rules and team dashboards; optional per-log-storage pricing

Why now

Coding agents just crossed from novelty to daily driver, and quota anxiety is everywhere while vendors have zero incentive to help you spend less; a local proxy layer is a two-week build with no platform dependencies