PaperclipAI Is Free. Your AI Provider Bill Is Not. Here's the Real Cost Breakdown.

PaperclipAI is open-source software. The platform is free. But running AI agents costs money — specifically, the tokens consumed by the AI models your agents use. PaperclipAI tracks every token, every model call, every cost in cents — and lets you set hard budgets. Here's the real cost picture.

Where the money actually goes

How PaperclipAI tracks costs

Every agent heartbeat reports: which LLM provider was used, which model, input tokens, output tokens, and cost in cents. These roll up into dashboards showing company-level spend, per-agent spend, and per-project spend. You see exactly what each piece of work costs.

Budget enforcement

• Company-level monthly budget in cents — hard ceiling on total spend
• Per-agent monthly budget — individual spending limits
• 80% threshold: soft alert — agent is warned to focus on critical tasks only
• 100% threshold: hard stop — agent is auto-paused, no more heartbeats until budget resets or is increased