Comment by licjon
5 days ago
Is there a router or wrapper that provides a real-time cost estimation for alternative settings? Obviously, you can't predict exact output tokens without running the inference, but a tool that calculates the exact input cost across models and applies a historical average for the output tokens could be useful. Like, you run a task on Sonnet, and it estimates: "Based on your input tokens and a 1:1 output ratio, this would have cost $X on Opus at a low effort level."
Not sure of any out-of-the-box tool. But Anthropic has a token count API which gives a near estimate of the input tokens for messages [1].
So this API can be used in a UserPromptSubmit hook [2] in the harness, get the token count for any model, calculate the cost and compare.
[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/token-...
[2] https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks