frugal

frugal

Cloud cost awareness for coding agents.

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Agents deploy to Vercel, spin up Neon databases, run E2B sandboxes, push commits that trigger GitHub Actions — all metered — and non-technical users only find out on the monthly bill. frugal makes the agent spend consciously: surface free-tier numbers and fail-open vs hard-pause on first touch, optional usage digs, one-line notice before lasting paid resources, and tear down of what it left running. It never blocks the command.

Works across Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Qoder, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, pi, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, and Kiro — one ruleset, one source of truth.

Why a plugin, not “just tell the model to be careful”?

LLMs ship with frozen training-cut knowledge of free tiers, defaults, and “how this cloud bills.” Cloud pricing and fail-open traps move every quarter (Workflows per-step billing, Spend Management notify-only, free-tier cliffs). The model still “remembers” last year’s story.

frugal keeps the numbers and tripwires in the repo — versioned, researched, testable — and injects them into the agent loop on each session / pre-CLI hit. Update the package (or pull the repo) and the loop gets current billing, not whatever the weights last memorized.

How it saves you money

Two layers, both context-cheap (~1.7 KB of rules per session + at most 5 full reminders per day — after that, new services still get a numbers-only line — never blocking), with intensity levels like a volume knob:

• Session rules (SessionStart): one short line on first touch, announce lasting paid resources, kill ephemeral things, escalate only for scary spend.
• Just-in-time data (PreToolUse): vercel → short Vercel line, wrangler r2 → R2, git push with workflows → Actions — once per provider per session. Horror-dollar amounts stay in strict (and the skill), not every deploy.

This is scoped to normal usage that quietly runs up a bill — wrong tier, a forgotten resource, a loop that hits a paid meter, a config default nobody checke