If you are using GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or any LLM-powered coding assistant, you owe it to your team and your budget to know exactly how much that AI is costing you.
Most teams have a vague idea of their AI spend:
- Yes, we have Copilot licenses.
- Yes, we use OpenAI API keys directly.
- Yes, Cursor is enabled for the engineering team.
But when you dig deeper, you will find token usage is rarely tracked per project, per sprint, or per developer. That makes it impossible to answer the questions that finance and engineering leads actually need answered:
- Which project is burning the most tokens?
- Which team member generates the most AI-assisted requests?
- Is our prompt strategy increasing our spend month over month?
Why token tracking matters now
AI-assisted development is no longer an experiment. It is production infrastructure, and it should be treated with the same rigor as cloud costs, CI minutes, or third-party API usage.
The hidden risks of unmonitored AI costs:
- Unused or underused seats that keep renewing automatically
- Unbounded token usage on open-ended prompts or long codebases
- No accountability between prompt quality and cost
What to track
A practical tracking setup should give you:
- Real-time token usage per developer and per project
- Cost estimates based on the underlying model pricing
- Exportable reports you can tie back to sprint budgets
- Compatibility with Copilot, Cursor, OpenAI, and similar tools
A lightweight approach
You do not need an enterprise APM tool to start tracking AI costs. A lightweight tracker can:
- Monitor API request and completion tokens
- Map usage to your team or project labels
- Generate CSV or dashboard-ready outputs
- Handle one-time setup without ongoing engineering overhead
Start this week
Pick one team or one project and instrument its AI usage for the next sprint. Get a baseline. Then decide whether that baseline is what you expected.
If you do not measure it, you cannot optimize it. And right now, most teams are flying blind on AI coding spend.
Looking for a practical starting point? The AI Coding Cost Tracker gives engineering teams full visibility into token usage and project-level costs, with exportable reports and compatibility for Copilot, Cursor, and OpenAI-powered tools. Learn more at theaisuite.pages.dev/copilot-token-billing.
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