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Usage & Costs

pw code tracks token usage and estimated cost throughout a session, keeps long conversations within the model's context window through compaction (summarizing older messages to free context space), and lets you cap how much a single turn can consume.

Session Usage: /cost and the Status Line

The status line at the bottom of the interface always shows a compact summary: the live context size (the tokens the model currently reads each turn), the cumulative total for the session, and the estimated cost once it is non-trivial, for example 98.5K ctx · 1.2M total (~$1.8402).

For the full breakdown, run /cost:

Token Usage:
  Input:  1.1M tokens
  Output: 85.3K tokens
  Turns: 42
  Estimated cost: $1.8402

Costs are estimated from the per-token rates configured on the platform for each model, priced per model, so a session that switched models is costed against the model that produced each turn. Usage from subagents rolls up into the session totals as it happens, so /cost reflects everything the session spent, delegated work included.

Estimates depend on configured rates

Models with no configured rate, such as custom or session-tunnel providers, contribute nothing to the estimate. A session that used such a model can show a lower cost than it actually incurred.

Provider Quotas: /usage

Some providers report their own usage limits, most notably a connected ChatGPT/Codex subscription, which has rolling quota windows. For models from such a provider, /usage shows each window as a bar with its reset time:

Provider usage (plus plan)
 
5-hour limit
  [████████░░░░░░░░░░░░] 41.0% used
  Resets Jul 19, 2026 at 6:00 PM CDT
 
Weekly limit
  [██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░] 12.5% used
  Resets Jul 23, 2026 at 9:00 AM CDT

/usage is only available when the selected model's provider reports usage information; otherwise the command is hidden from the palette and /help. This is the provider's own quota, separate from the platform cost estimate above.

Context Compaction

As a conversation grows, every turn sends more history to the model. When the live context reaches the compaction threshold (100,000 input tokens by default), pw code automatically compacts the conversation at the end of the turn: older messages are replaced with a model-written summary, while the system prompt and the most recent messages are kept verbatim. The conversation continues seamlessly, the ctx figure in the status line drops, and the compaction is recorded in the session file so a later resume sees the compacted history.

You can also compact manually at any time with /compact, which shows you the summary it produced.

The threshold is configurable with the compactAt setting (a token count) in your settings:

{
  "compactAt": 150000
}

Per-Turn Budget: maxTurnTokens

The maxTurnTokens setting caps how many tokens (input plus output) a single turn may consume across all of its model requests. When a turn reaches the budget, it stops with a message in the transcript:

Turn stopped: per-turn token budget of 200000 reached.

The session itself continues, and you can send the next message as usual. Unset (or 0) means no per-turn limit. This is a useful guardrail for autonomous multi-step work, where a single prompt can otherwise fan out into many tool-calling iterations.

{
  "maxTurnTokens": 200000
}

Usage in Non-Interactive Runs

One-shot (non-interactive) runs report the same numbers. In text mode, the status-line summary is printed to stderr when the run completes; with -o json, the output object carries usage.input_tokens, usage.output_tokens, usage.total_tokens, and estimated_cost. See Non-Interactive Mode for the full schema. Subagent usage is included in these totals; there is no per-subagent breakdown.

Account-Level Usage

The estimates above are per-session. For metered spend and token reporting across your account (including Chat, AI keys, and allocation budgets), use the AI Usage dashboard under AI > AI Usage in ACTIVATE. Organization admins can also see organization-wide usage there, grouped by model, user, or allocation.

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