cost-tracking on tomrochette.com

AgentTrace

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AgentTrace is an MIT-licensed local-first Rust TUI and CLI that reads the session logs your coding agents already wrote and reports their cost, tokens, latency, failures, and health.

AgentTrace’s bet is the narrow one this category keeps proving out: the useful telemetry is already on disk, and the product is a fast local query over it, with governance reports and CI gates bolted on top.

What it is
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One Rust binary gives both interfaces: run agenttrace with no action to open the TUI, or pass flags such as --overview, --audit, --recommend, --mcp-governance, --context-trends, and --delivery-evidence for CLI and JSON output. It parses about 15 named coding-agent formats (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, Cline, Aider, Cursor exports, Hermes Agent, OpenCode, OpenClaw, Pi, Oh My Pi, Kimi CLI, Copilot-style logs) plus generic JSON and JSONL traces. Install paths are Homebrew, npm, winget, curl, and cargo. Everything runs locally: no hosted backend is required, and tool steps keep metadata and duration without storing prompt, response, result, or tool-argument bodies. Reports render as JSON, Markdown, or self-contained HTML, and --overview can gate a CI job on session health, critical sessions, and tool-failure rate. Made by an independent developer (luoyuctl) under MIT.

Status
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Young and active: 137 stars, 9 forks, 7 open issues, created 2026-05-01, last pushed 2026-09-14, latest release v0.8.1 on 2026-09-06, as of 2026-09-27. It is effectively a one-person project: 413 of 415 commits come from the owner, and the next contributor has a single commit. The community footprint is nearly empty: a Hacker News search for the author returns nothing, and I found no Reddit discussion. A pre-1.0 single-maintainer tool with serious packaging but no independent verification, so read its roadmap and issue tracker rather than its README for what actually ships.

Strengths
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Breadth of local parsing is unusually wide for its age: about 15 named harness formats plus generic JSON and JSONL behind one binary.
Slow-run diagnosis is the differentiator: it surfaces long gaps, hanging sessions, retry loops, slow tool calls, large parameters, and context pressure, which the cost-first tools in this category do not.
Governance reports are deliberate about evidence quality, labeling cost and delivery numbers as estimates or heuristics and reporting parse and pricing confidence instead of hiding gaps.
CI integration is first class: --overview exits with code 2 on a failed health, critical-session, or tool-failure gate, and it can keep JSON on stdout while writing a Markdown or HTML artifact.
Distribution punches above its size: Homebrew tap, npm, winget, curl, and cargo, with a documented parser contribution flow.

Cautions
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Cost and delivery evidence is self-labeled as estimated: unknown models fall back to pricing, and the README says outright these are not provider billing or proof a commit reached main.
Pre-1.0 with a fast-moving report schema, so scripts consuming the governance JSON should expect churn.
One maintainer and no third-party benchmark or discussion, so reliability claims rest on the README, the CI workflow, and the maintainer’s own tests.
It reads logs, so coverage is only as complete as each harness writes, and unsupported formats degrade to Limited capability levels rather than a full trace.
There is no live view and no provenance: it answers what a run cost and why it was slow after the fact, not what an agent is doing now or which session wrote a line.

Pricing
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Free and open source under MIT. No paid tiers are published, and everything runs locally with no hosted service.

Compared to
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agentsview: the broader archive with more than 60 formats and a web and desktop UI; AgentTrace is narrower but terminal-first and adds latency and anomaly diagnosis plus CI gates, so choose AgentTrace for slow-run triage and agentsview for cross-harness history at scale.
agents-observe: the live hook-fed dashboard for Claude Code and Codex; AgentTrace is retrospective, so they answer different moments.
ctx: the search-and-blame CLI; AgentTrace does not do provenance, and ctx does not do cost or latency, so a cost-conscious engineer may run both.

Bottom line
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Recommended for terminal-first engineers running several harnesses who want a local audit of session cost, latency, and failures with CI gates, and who value a private, no-backend setup. Not for live observation, transcript search, or line-level provenance.

Changes
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2026-09-27 - Created.

References
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https://github.com/luoyuctl/agenttrace - the repository, MIT license, description, and topics
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luoyuctl/agenttrace/master/README.md - the coverage list, governance flags, install paths, privacy posture, and report formats
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luoyuctl/agenttrace/master/docs/guides/ci-integration.md - the CI gate flags, exit code 2, and report artifacts
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/luoyuctl/agenttrace/master/ROADMAP.md - the local-first scope and explicit non-goals
https://api.github.com/repos/luoyuctl/agenttrace - stars, forks, dates, and license as of 2026-09-27
https://api.github.com/repos/luoyuctl/agenttrace/releases - the v0.8.1 release date
https://registry.npmjs.org/@zack78/agenttrace - the npm package at 0.8.1
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=luoyuctl - the empty Hacker News footprint behind the thin-community claim

ClawTrace

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ClawTrace is a hosted tracing and cost-attribution platform for OpenClaw agents: an Apache-2.0 OpenClaw plugin streams every run to a cloud pipeline that renders trace trees, call graphs, Gantt timelines, per-step dollar cost, and an AI analyst named Tracy.

ClawTrace is this category’s first hosted answer, and that is also its central trade-off: it sees more of each run than the local tools (real LLM payloads, sub-agent graphs, live cost) because your agent’s traffic leaves your machine for its data lake.

What it is
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The @epsilla/clawtrace plugin intercepts eight OpenClaw hook types (session_start, session_end, llm_input, llm_output, before_tool_call, after_tool_call, subagent_spawning, subagent_ended) and batches events to a hosted ingest service. The pipeline writes partitioned JSON to cloud storage, materializes it through Databricks into Iceberg tables, exposes it as a Cypher graph in PuppyGraph (Tenant, Agent, Trace, and Span vertices with CHILD_OF edges), and serves a FastAPI backend and a Next.js UI. Three views cover each trace: an execution tree with per-node cost badges, a force-directed call graph, and a Gantt timeline, plus a trajectory dashboard with daily trends. Tracy is an AI analyst wired to the graph: it runs live Cypher queries, generates charts, and answers plain-English questions such as why a run cost so much or which tool fails most. Pricing covers more than 80 models with cache-aware rates (fresh input, cached input, cache write, and output billed separately). Setup is three shell commands, and the vendor is Epsilla, the company behind the Epsilla vector database. The repository is Apache-2.0, but the hosted cloud is the product and no self-hosted deployment path is documented.

Status
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Active but with the thinnest footprint in the category: 48 stars, 10 forks, 3 open issues, created 2026-04-10, last pushed 2026-08-15, with the npm plugin at version 0.1.23 published 2026-04-16, as of 2026-09-27. It launched on Hacker News twice in April 2026 (a 2-point post and a 1-point Show HN, neither with a comment beyond the author’s own), and I found no Reddit discussion. It also carries a paper, “ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillation” (arXiv 2604.23853), which is unusually rigorous for a tool at this stage. A hosted product from a small org with an academic paper and almost no community discussion, so treat the roadmap’s self-evolving-agent promises as research rather than shipped features.

Strengths
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Full-payload tracing is the most detailed column in this category: real LLM inputs and outputs and tool payloads, not just token counts and tool names.
Cost attribution at step granularity with more than 80 models and cache-aware pricing, aimed squarely at the incident the README describes (an agent burning roughly 40 times its budget by replaying 1,500 messages of history).
Three complementary views plus Ask Tracy, which turns the trace graph into natural-language answers instead of leaving interpretation to the reader.
The self-evolve skill and /v1/evolve/ask endpoint let the agent query its own trajectories, an unusual closed loop inside the product.
The published paper gives it more methodological transparency than most tools in the category.

Cautions
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It is hosted and cloud-only: trace payloads, including LLM inputs and outputs, stream to the vendor’s data lake, the opposite of the local-first posture the rest of this category shares.
Consumption billing meters storage continuously at 1.35 credits per MB per day, so idle traces keep drawing credits until they are deleted.
The vendor’s own paper reports no aggregate cost saving across the full 84-task SkillsBench transfer and no aggregate cost reduction when prune patches are removed, which undercuts the cheapest-sounding promise.
Single-harness by design: OpenClaw only, and the data only exists if the OpenClaw plugin is installed and authenticated.
Independent signal is very thin: two low-point Hacker News posts, no comments, and no third-party review I could find.

Pricing
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Consumption-based credits, with no monthly seat fee. New users get 100 free credits, and credit packages run $10 for 1,000 credits, $50 for 5,000, $90 for 10,000 (listed as 10% off), and $400 for 50,000, with all packages expiring one year after purchase. Usage is metered per feature: storage 1.35 credits per MB per day, listing trajectories 0.5 credits per query, trajectory detail 0.2 credits per query, Tracy input 0.5 credits per 1k tokens, and Tracy output 2.5 credits per 1k tokens. Reaching zero credits puts the account into a deficit state that blocks ingestion and queries until it is topped up.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-09-27	Credit packages	Starter introduced at $10 / 1,000 credits; Growth at $50 / 5,000; Pro at $90 / 10,000; Scale at $400 / 50,000; storage metered at 1.35 credits/MB/day	https://www.clawtrace.ai/docs/billing/credits

Compared to
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agents-observe: the local, MIT live dashboard for Claude Code and Codex; ClawTrace is hosted and OpenClaw-only but captures full payloads, so choose ClawTrace only if you run OpenClaw and can upload traces.
agenttrace: the local-first audit that also reads OpenClaw logs; choose agenttrace instead when the data cannot leave the machine.
Langfuse: a self-hostable LLM observability stack with traces and evals; choose ClawTrace for OpenClaw-specific cost attribution and the built-in analyst, Langfuse for a bring-your-own stack.

Bottom line
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Recommended for OpenClaw operators who want full-payload traces, per-step cost, and an AI analyst, and who accept a hosted cloud. Not for anyone who needs traces to stay local, multi-harness coverage, or a self-hosted observability stack.

Changes
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2026-09-27 - Created.

References
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https://github.com/epsilla-cloud/clawtrace - the repository, Apache-2.0 license, stars, and forks as of 2026-09-27
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/epsilla-cloud/clawtrace/main/README.md - the plugin, eight hooks, cloud pipeline, graph schema, pricing detail, self-evolve skill, and paper citation
https://www.clawtrace.ai/ - the product pitch, three views, and the headline claim of showing what failed and where spend leaked
https://www.clawtrace.ai/docs/billing/credits - the credit packages, consumption rates, free credits, and deficit state
https://www.clawtrace.ai/docs/getting-started/install-plugin - the eight hook types and the three-step setup
https://www.clawtrace.ai/docs/ask-tracy - what the Tracy analyst answers from the trace graph
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23853 - the paper and its no-aggregate-savings and regression-lane findings
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/47769889 - the 1-point Show HN behind the thin-community claim

cost-tracking on tomrochette.com

AgentTrace

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cost-tracking on tomrochette.com

AgentTrace

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