holy sh*t. 5 agents, $4.18 in 20 seconds. Stop adding agents you can't price. One habit from this Jev board is worth stealing, and the demo meter shows why. Check what each stage cost before the next one starts: /cost M-01 to M-05 pass work around the board, 19 transfers by the last frame. Worker tokens go from 198,628 on the first frame to 233,055 on the last. The release gate ends at 261 allowed, 7 held, 5 blocked. Three critical moments: → M-02 carries $0.42 across the board. Who approved that spend? → The meter climbs about 20 cents a second. Who sees it before the total does? → Requests reach 299 by the end. What stops request 300 if the budget is gone? More agents, more handoffs, more tokens. This is Jev engineering one layer down, where the money moves. Divide the meter by the handoffs and every transfer in this demo costs about $0.22. You only see that number if something prints it. Count it, cap it, then scale it. - the full budget setup > a cost line for each stage: ingest, plan, execute, verify, gate, commit > session cost and tokens visible in the status line the whole time > a log entry for every handoff: which agent, which task, how many tokens > a turn limit for every subagent > a hard stop when a stage goes over its budget Paste this prompt into Claude Code below: "Set up cost tracking in my Claude Code project before I add more subagents: 1. Add a status line that shows session cost and tokens used 2. Write a budget section in CLAUDE.md: > a dollar limit per task and per stage > stop and ask me when a stage goes over it 3. Add a SubagentStop hook that appends each subagent's name, task and token use (read from its transcript) to logs/handoffs.log 4. Give every subagent in .claude/agents a clear scope and a turn limit 5. After each stage, print what it cost and how much budget is left Show every file you plan to change first. Do not apply edits until confirmed" ↳ the board is an animated concept with demo numbers, the setup above is the part you can run today