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Cost — the ledger and hm cost

hermes-max records every model call to a ledger and prints an honest spend view with hm cost. The whole point of the design is that you can see what the free constellation saves you and prove the paid tiers stay sparing.

What hm cost shows

The ledger records tokens + USD at $0.000000 precision (six decimals — fan-out costs live in the 4th–6th). Free providers record real token counts at $0.000000, so you see volume even at zero cost.

hm cost            # month-to-date
hm cost today      # a narrower window
hm cost week

It breaks down by:

  • totals for today / week / month, by provider, model, and role;
  • a free-vs-paid split — tokens served at $0 vs tokens that cost money, i.e. how much the free constellation is saving you;
  • remaining daily free budget per free model (from the bucket tracker), so you know how much fan-out budget is left today.

The bucket tracker parses Groq / OpenRouter / Cerebras rate-limit headers into a unified remaining-RPM/TPM/RPD view, and the router pre-checks it so a rung is skipped before sending — you never absorb a 429.

What each mode costs

Mode Typical monthly What you're paying for
local / free $0.00 nothing — local + free tiers only
full-local ~$1.50 V4-Pro planning (~$0.05/day); local execution free
full ~$17 V4-Pro plans + V4-Flash drives, both API, no rate limits
frontier-local ~$45 Opus planning + local execution
frontier ~$60 Opus planning + V4-Flash execution

Measured anchors from development: V4-Pro ~$0.0035/brief, V4-Flash ~$0.00022/brief; an Opus frontier call ~$0.08–1.25 (~$0.10 cached). See providers.md for per-token prices.

The frontier tier is deliberately rare

hm cost proves the Opus rung stays sparing: it shows the month-to-date per-tier spend, the Opus call count + cost against the sparing target (≤ ~15/month), the frontier-mode total versus a Claude Code flat subscription, and a warning if Opus drifts over target — which means either the difficulty gate is too loose, or the work is genuinely blue-ocean and a Claude Code subscription may fit you better (reported honestly). A hard monthly/daily frontier USD cap blocks and falls back to V4-Pro when hit.

The bigger economic picture

For a dispassionate, fully-worked comparison of the local-sovereign, BYOK-API, and commercial-subscription options — including hardware amortization and the cases where a commercial subscription is genuinely the right answer — see local-vs-subscription.md.

The mechanics of the ledger and routing live in architecture.md §14.