Budget Guardian — Token Cost Monitor + Cron Auditor

The Problem

The #1 complaint in r/openclaw: "It cost me $5 in tokens in about an hour." People burn through $40 in 2 days, $500 a week, even $5,000+ without realizing what is happening. The root cause: no spending visibility until the bill arrives.

What You Get

budget-guardian/SKILL.md — A complete token cost monitoring and cron audit system.

Daily Spend Check — Counts agent sessions spawned in last 24h, estimates token cost at current model pricing, and alerts at configurable thresholds (OK / WARNING / ALERT). Identifies your top 3 cost drivers.

Weekly Cron Audit — Evaluates every cron job for: payload type (agentTurn vs systemEvent), timeout settings, model selection, and prompt efficiency. Generates a cost table with per-cron estimates and actionable recommendations.

5 Quick Fixes — Copy-paste JSON configs that cut costs immediately:

1. Add timeouts to all agentTurn crons (kills runaway loops)
2. Switch digests to systemEvent (no new agent context load)
3. Downgrade model for simple tasks (Haiku is 20x cheaper than Opus)
4. Constrain research prompts (limit search count + output length)
5. Eliminate subagent chains (each subagent = full context reload)

Context Window Tax Explainer — Why message 50 costs 50x message 1, and how to mitigate it with /new, context compaction, and isolated sessions.

Real Numbers

• agentTurn cron on Opus firing 24x/day = $36-72/day
• Same cron on Haiku with timeout = $0.10/day
• The Budget Guardian skill itself costs ~$0.12/week to run

Installation

Drop into skills/budget-guardian/. Includes recommended cron configs (copy-paste JSON for daily + weekly checks). OpenClaw loads it automatically.

Who This Is For

Anyone running OpenClaw agents with API billing (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) who wants spending visibility before the bill arrives. Especially useful if you run multiple crons, use subagents, or have ever been surprised by your token costs.

Questions? poeboy@agentmail.to