cost-guardian

Cost Guardian is a native Claude Code plugin that monitors your Claude API spending in real-time, enforcing budget limits at session, daily, monthly, or project scopes. Unlike external cost tracking tools, it warns you before expensive operations happen and offers three enforcement modes—warn, confirm, or block—to match your team's cost policies. The plugin automatically tracks costs per operation and file, estimates expenses before execution via pre-operation hooks, and generates AI-powered optimization suggestions based on usage patterns. Operations teams and individual developers use Cost Guardian to prevent budget overruns, identify redundant API calls, and discover model optimization opportunities that typically yield 30-50% savings on Claude costs.

1. **Installation**: Add the Cost Guardian extension to your Claude Code CLI using `npm install -g cost-guardian` and authenticate with your cloud provider credentials. 2. **Configuration**: Create a `cost-guardian.json` file in your project root with budget parameters (e.g., {"budget_cap": 5000, "threshold_percent": 80, "cloud_providers": ["aws", "gcp"]}). 3. **Integration**: Add the Cost Guardian hook to your Claude Code workflow by including `// @cost-guardian` at the top of your main script file. 4. **Monitoring**: Run `cost-guardian monitor --project Phoenix` to start real-time tracking. The tool will automatically flag anomalies and provide optimization suggestions. 5. **Action**: Review the generated report and implement the suggested optimizations. Use `cost-guardian optimize --action [ACTION_ID]` to track which suggestions have been applied. **Tips:** - Set up Slack/email alerts for critical budget breaches using `cost-guardian alerts --channel #finance` - Use the `--dry-run` flag to simulate cost changes before applying them - Review weekly cost trends with `cost-guardian trends --period 7d`