Copilot Live Cost & Token Tracker

See your GitHub Copilot spend live — real-time tokens, cost, and credits, right inside VS Code.

Features

Real-Time Cost Dashboard

• Activity Bar sidebar with a live-updating dashboard showing token usage and cost breakdowns
• Status bar indicator displaying session and daily cost at a glance
• Per-model breakdown: see exactly which models (Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, etc.) are consuming your budget

Budget Alerts

• Configurable warning and limit thresholds for session, daily, and weekly spending
• Color-coded status bar: normal → yellow (warning) → red (limit reached)
• VS Code notifications when thresholds are crossed

Session Tracking

• Automatic detection of the current chat session
• Historical view of recent sessions with cost summaries
• 7-day rolling window with daily cost buckets

Cost History & Persistence

• Daily cost aggregates saved to disk so data survives database resets
• Configurable retention (7–365 days, default 90)
• Automatic background scraping with minimal I/O

Privacy & Portability

• Reads only local Copilot telemetry and debug logs from VS Code's user storage
• Works across VS Code, VS Code Insiders, VSCodium, and portable installs — the storage location is resolved automatically from the extension's own storage path
• Cross-platform support: macOS, Windows, and Linux storage paths resolved automatically
• No data leaves your machine — all processing is 100% local

Accurate Pricing

• Built-in pricing table covering Claude (Opus, Sonnet, Haiku), GPT-4o/4.1, o1, o3, Gemini, and more
• Fuzzy model name matching handles version suffixes and naming variations
• User-configurable pricing overrides for custom or new models

Requirements

• VS Code 1.100 or later — including Insiders, VSCodium, and portable installs
• GitHub Copilot Chat extension installed (this is where the usage data comes from)

Installation

From the Marketplace

1. Open VS Code
2. Go to the Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X / Cmd+Shift+X)
3. Search for "Copilot Live Cost & Token Tracker"
4. Click Install

From VSIX

1. Download the .vsix file from Releases
2. In VS Code, open the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P / Cmd+Shift+P)
3. Run Extensions: Install from VSIX…
4. Select the downloaded file

How to Use

1. Install the extension — it activates automatically when VS Code starts
2. Open the sidebar — click the Copilot Cost icon in the Activity Bar (left side)
3. Use Copilot as normal — the dashboard updates every 10 seconds (configurable)
4. Monitor the status bar — session and daily cost are always visible at the bottom

Reading the dashboard

Per-model rows may carry a small badge:

• estimated — the model wasn't in the built-in pricing table, so its rate was inferred from a related model family. The cost is approximate.
• unpriced — no pricing could be resolved at all, so the model's tokens are shown but contribute $0 to totals. Add a custom pricing override to price it.

Commands

Configuration

All settings are under copilotCostTracker.* in VS Code Settings:

Numeric settings are clamped to safe ranges, so an out-of-range value falls back to a sensible default rather than breaking polling.

Custom pricing overrides

Use pricingOverrides to price new or custom models. Keys are model-name patterns; rates are USD per 1 million tokens. Entries that don't match this shape are ignored.

"copilotCostTracker.pricingOverrides": {
  "my-custom-model": {
    "input": 3.0,      // required: fresh input tokens
    "output": 15.0,    // required: output tokens
    "cached": 0.3,     // required: cache-read tokens
    "cacheWrite": 3.75 // optional: cache-write tokens
  }
}

Data Sources

The extension reads from local Copilot databases in VS Code's user storage. The location is resolved automatically per product flavour and OS (no path is hardcoded):

Known Limitations

• Cache-write token data is only available from agent-traces.db (not debug logs)
• Pricing for very new or custom models may require manual overrides
• Cost figures are estimates based on public API pricing — actual billing may differ

Troubleshooting

The dashboard says no data is available. Cost tracking reads agent-traces.db, which Copilot Chat only writes when its OpenTelemetry tracing is enabled. Enable github.copilot.chat.otel.dbSpanExporter.enabled, run a Copilot Chat session, and restart VS Code if the file still isn't created. Until then, you can set copilotCostTracker.costDataSource to with-fallback to estimate from debug logs (cache-write data will be missing).

A model shows as unpriced or estimated. This is expected for brand-new or custom models. Add a pricing override to price it accurately.

Nothing updates / errors in the logs. The extension reads the SQLite databases through a background worker that uses your system Node.js. Check the "Copilot Cost Tracker" output channel for details, then use Copilot Cost: Refresh Cost Data to retry.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full workflow and guidelines.

# Clone and set up
git clone https://github.com/erviAI/cost-research.git
cd cost-research/extension
npm ci

# Development
npm run watch         # Rebuild on change
npm run lint          # Lint with ESLint
npm run typecheck     # Type-check src/ and test/
npm test              # Run tests
npm run test:coverage # Run tests with coverage

# Package
npm run package       # Produces .vsix file

License

MIT © erviAI