ai-bill-intelligence

What This Skill Does

AI Bill Intelligence is a comprehensive cost-tracking solution for OpenClaw users, designed to provide real-time transparency into AI API consumption. In an era where multiple models are used interchangeably, it is often difficult to keep track of total expenditure. This skill bridges that gap by monitoring usage across OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Kimi, DeepSeek, and Grok. It functions as a local monitoring suite, featuring a collector service that hooks into your OpenClaw sessions and a web-based dashboard that visualizes your current spending versus initial balances. By providing granular data, it ensures you stay within your budget constraints and avoid unexpected overages from your AI providers.

Installation

There are two primary ways to install this skill. The recommended approach is via the OpenClaw CLI for seamless integration: run openclaw skill add ai-bill-intelligence in your terminal. Once installed, you must initialize your financial tracking by editing the vault.json file located in the skill directory to set your initial balances for each provider. After configuration, initialize the monitoring backend by running sudo systemctl start ai-bill ai-bill-collector.

If CLI installation fails, you can perform a manual installation by extracting the skill contents into ~/.openclaw/skills/ai-bill-intelligence. Following this, you must manually register the systemd services by copying the service files to /etc/systemd/system/, reloading the system daemon, and enabling the services using sudo systemctl enable --now ai-bill ai-bill-collector. Ensure that your permissions are correctly configured so that the collector has read/write access to your local session data.

Use Cases

This skill is perfect for power users, developers, and small teams who rely on OpenClaw for daily tasks. It is particularly useful for managing team budgets for AI token usage, preventing "bill shock" at the end of the month, and comparing the cost-efficiency of different LLM providers for specific workloads. If you are experimenting with multiple models, this tool allows you to see exactly which provider is consuming the most budget in real-time.

Example Prompts

1. "Check my current spending for this month across all AI providers."
2. "Show me the dashboard for my remaining budget on the Claude and OpenAI accounts."
3. "Is my ai-bill-collector service still running, and how much have I spent on DeepSeek today?"

Tips & Limitations

To maintain accuracy, always ensure your initial balances in vault.json are updated whenever you add funds to your provider accounts. Note that this skill requires root access to manage systemd services. If the dashboard at http://localhost:8003 does not update, verify that the ai-bill-collector service is active using systemctl status. Remember that this tool tracks your local OpenClaw usage; it does not directly query your provider accounts for official billing data, so keep your configuration files in sync with your actual credit status.