Get a daily AI spend card in your Inbox
Two ways to get a card each morning about yesterday's AI spend: the built-in Daily spend summary or the Daily Spend Report plugin.
A daily spend card puts yesterday's AI spend in your Inbox every morning, so you notice a costly day without opening Stats. There are two, and both are off until you turn them on. Neither one uses AI, so neither costs anything to run.
Turn on the Daily spend summary#
The built-in summary covers the AI work outside your Claude coding sessions: background helpers (such as session titles and summaries) and sessions on other engines, such as Codex. It splits that spend into what was billed to your API keys and what a plan login covered, with one line per AI provider. It leaves out your Claude coding sessions entirely; for those, use Stats or the plugin below.
Open Settings > Notifications.
Turn on Daily spend summary.
The card arrives once a day, from 8 AM, the first time Yardmaster is running after that. A day with no spend gets no card. It also needs Allow agents to raise inbox alerts on (it is on at first).
Turn on the Daily Spend Report plugin#
The plugin posts a fuller card and adds a Daily Spend Report page to the sidebar, so you can read the same report at any time.
Open Settings > Plugins.
Find Daily Spend Report and flip its switch on.
To change the time, open Plugin Settings on the card and pick a Report time. It starts at 9:00 AM.
If Yardmaster was closed at that time, the card is posted the next time it starts that day, never twice. See Add features with plugins for how plugins work.
What the plugin's numbers mean#
The card shows yesterday, the last 7 days and the last 30 days in two columns:
Value: your agents' coding sessions, priced at the AI makers' API prices. On a Claude plan, this is what the work would have cost on an API key, not money you paid.
Out of pocket (marked with a key): background helpers, such as session titles and summaries, billed to anything other than a plan login (an API key, or no account at all). This is money you paid.
Below that come yesterday's sessions by engine, the background helpers and their cost, and, when one charge reached 10 cents or more, the largest single charges.
How accurate are these numbers?#
Both cards use the same records as Stats: prices at public API rates, worked out on this computer. They are close estimates, not your provider's invoice. A session counts on the day it started.
Cost alerts. Separate from these cards, AI cost alerts in Settings > Notifications adds an inbox card when a day's spend is unusually high, at most once a day.
Small engines. Value leaves out an engine whose spend for the period is under half a cent.
The plugin's permissions. Daily Spend Report reads your spend records, posts to the Inbox and keeps one note of when it last posted. It does not contact the internet.