I tracked 2.86 billion AI coding tokens. Here's what a commit actually costs.

Brayden Yancy — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:46:04 +0000

Every team I talk to is paying for Claude Code, Copilot, Codex or all three. Almost none of them can answer a simple question: what did that AI spend actually ship?

The provider invoice tells you how many tokens you bought. It doesn't tell you which commits those tokens turned into. So I built a tool that does, and pointed it at my own work first.

The numbers

Here's everything Centrail has tracked on my own AI-assisted development so far:

Metric	Total
Tokens	2.86 billion
AI spend	$4,099
Commits	944
Cost per commit	$4.34

Why cost per commit matters

"We spend $X a month on AI" is a budget line. "$4.34 per shipped commit" is a unit cost you can actually manage. Once you have it, you can ask better questions:

Which repos burn the most tokens per commit?
Which models cost more without shipping more?
When did spend spike, and did output spike with it?
Are there cheaper models that would do the same job?

How it works

Centrail runs where the work happens, on your machine, not at the invoice level. The CLI reads local usage from your AI coding agents and ties each token and dollar to the Git commit it produced. That syncs to a dashboard, so the whole team or organization stays up to date on real AI metrics automatically. Nobody has to update a spreadsheet.

It also estimates the energy, water and CO2 behind every token, with a public methodology, because AI's footprint is a cost too.

Try it

The CLI is open source: github.com/braydenyancy/centrail-cli
Dashboard and free tier: centrail.org

What does a commit cost on your team? If you don't know, I'd love to hear how you're thinking about AI spend in the comments.

DEV Community: Brayden Yancy

I tracked 2.86 billion AI coding tokens. Here's what a commit actually costs.

The numbers

Why cost per commit matters

How it works

Try it