What do you check first when your agent's API bill doubles? Reddit debates cost tracing
rcleffke · reddit · 2026-11-11
A Reddit thread asks: when your pay-per-use agent bill doubles, what do you check first? The author argues tracing is as much a money-and-trust tool as a debugging one — per-run token usage is the closest thing to an itemized receipt, and the same trace is what you pull up when a customer claims the agent got something wrong. He cites his own rankings site: LangSmith scores 7.1/10, open-source self-hostable Arize Phoenix 6.75, both with free tiers. Open questions: cost per task vs per customer, where to set spending caps (provider dashboard vs own code), and how long to retain conversation traces containing customer data.
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