budget_skill

Overview

This skill tracks agent spending, enforces budgets, and alerts you before costs escalate. It logs transactions, calculates remaining balance, and can block purchases that would exceed limits. Designed for autonomous agents handling real money, it prevents surprise bills and gives clear cost visibility.

How this skill works

The skill records each transaction in a local JSON store and maintains a configured total budget and alert threshold. Commands let you log expenses, check remaining balance, review history or summaries, export data, and simulate a purchase to see if it is safe. When the balance drops below the alert threshold the skill emits warnings, and it blocks transactions that would push you over budget.

When to use it

• When an agent has API keys or services that can incur real charges.
• Before making any purchase to verify there is sufficient budget.
• Daily or weekly to review spending and remaining funds.
• When you need auditable transaction history for billing or reporting.
• Before enabling new automated behaviors that consume paid resources.

Best practices

• Log transactions immediately after any real spend—avoid batching entries.
• Set an alert threshold (e.g., 25% of total budget) to get early warnings.
• Use consistent categories (domain, hosting, api, tool, subscription, marketing, other) for clean summaries.
• Run summary at the start of each day to catch creeping usage early.
• Use the check command programmatically before permitting any agent-driven payment.

Example use cases

• An autonomous deployment agent checks budget before provisioning paid hosting.
• A bot logs domain and API purchases to maintain a clear cost ledger for accounting.
• A monitoring agent enforces hard spending caps and blocks costly experiments.
• A team exports CSV spending reports for monthly cost reconciliation.
• A developer runs a daily summary to spot unexpected third-party billing.