Cost and tokens

Cost and tokens

Every turn in Ptah is costed in real time. You see tokens in, tokens out, cache reads, and USD cost per message — and a running total for the session — without having to leave the chat.

Where costs appear

Location	What it shows
Cost bar (chat header)	Running session totals: input tokens, output tokens, cache reads, total USD.
Per-message footer	Tokens and USD for that single turn, including all sub-agents spawned from it.
Execution Tree node	Tokens and USD for each individual sub-agent and tool call.
Session summary card	End-of-session rollup with breakdowns per provider and per model.

Where pricing comes from

• Claude (direct Anthropic API) — published Anthropic pricing, per model.
• OpenRouter — live pricing pulled from the OpenRouter model registry. Prices update whenever OpenRouter updates theirs, so third-party models (Gemini, GPT, Moonshot, Z-AI, etc.) are costed accurately without app updates.
• Copilot — reported as $0 because billing is handled by your Copilot subscription. Tokens are still counted.
• Codex / OpenAI direct — official OpenAI pricing per model.
• Gemini direct — official Google pricing.
• Ollama (local and cloud) — reported as $0 for local; Ollama Cloud uses their published rates.
• Ptah CLI — reported as $0 (billing is handled by whatever provider the CLI wraps).

Note

If a provider returns an exact cost in its response (some APIs do), Ptah uses the reported value. Otherwise it multiplies token counts by the per-token price from the registry.

Cache tokens

Claude and several OpenRouter-backed models support prompt caching. Cached reads are dramatically cheaper than fresh input tokens, and Ptah shows them as a separate line item:

• Cache creation — first-time tokens that get written to the cache.
• Cache read — tokens served from the cache (≈ 10% of the fresh price on Anthropic).

Seeing a high cache-read count is a good sign: it means Ptah is reusing context across turns.

Per-session rollup

When you close a chat (or click Session summary in the chat header), you get a breakdown:

• Total USD, grouped by provider and model.
• Tokens in, tokens out, and cached tokens.
• Sub-agent spawn count and total sub-agent cost.
• Longest running tool call and slowest turn.

This is the same data exported to the usage logs for license reporting if you have a Pro subscription.

Tip

If costs look wrong, open the Execution Tree for the suspect turn. Every node carries its own token and USD numbers — usually the culprit is a sub-agent that pulled in a large folder attachment.