API-equivalent cost

API-equivalent cost is what the tokens a run used would cost at the model's published API prices. It is a yardstick, not always your bill: if you pay per token on the API it is close to your real cost, and on a flat plan it is different, but either way it lets you compare one task to another.

Work it out for a run with the cost calculator, which uses current prices from Anthropic's pricing page. The point is to make a heavy task obvious: the dollar figure tells you which feature was expensive to build in a way raw token counts do not show. Tools report this at different grains: ccusage totals usage by day or session, while Hatchlog attributes the cost to each task.