Cairn / Docs / Usage

Usage

A local, always-on record of every LLM and agent call — tokens, cost, and request volume across chat, the Cairn Agent, subagents, automations, and the one-shot AI features. Nothing leaves your machine.

The Usage view with stat cards, a daily input/output token chart, a by-model spend list, and a per-call history table
The Usage view — stat cards, daily token chart, by-model spend, and a per-call history table.

Opening Usage

Click Usage in the sidebar, right below Insights. The view is workspace-level (not per-project) and records everything locally, on every call.

What's tracked

Every request that hits a model is recorded with its input, output, and reasoning tokens, the model id, your saved provider's name, and cost where available:

Use the source filter dropdown in the toolbar to narrow to any single surface.

Toolbar & ranges

How cost is shown

Cost is shown whenever the provider reports it (e.g. NeuralWatt's energy accounting, or credit balances recovered from your account), and otherwise estimated from models.dev pricing — estimated figures are marked with a ~ and can be filtered out with the Estimates toggle. Estimates are cache-aware: cached input is priced at the model's cache-read/write rates rather than full input, so cache hits aren't over-billed. Costs are always shown in USD. The total reflects only provider-reported cost; estimated totals are not mixed in.

Prompt cache

The Usage view tracks prompt caching across every surface. A Cached input stat shows cached tokens and the percentage of input that hit the cache, and the history table has a Cached column per call. Cache-hit percentages are colour-coded — grey (no cache) → amber → accent → green as the rate rises (≥50% is green) — so you can see at a glance how much of your prompt spend caching is saving.

Clearing recorded usage

Use the trash button in the toolbar to wipe the token/cost/request history for the current workspace. It asks for a second click to confirm (styled tooltips explain each toolbar action) — useful for a fresh month or before handing a device over. The underlying database also auto-vacuums, so heavy use never leaves the file stuck at a large high-water mark.

Usage is separate from Insights

Insights analyses your project data — task activity, due dates, tag co-occurrence. Usage analyses your AI spend — tokens, cost, and calls. Both sit in the sidebar and both are entirely local.