Track costs

Weave tracks the cost of LLM calls in two ways:

Automatic cost tracking: For supported integrations, Weave captures token usage from the API response and applies built-in pricing for the model, with no extra code required.
Custom cost tracking: For fine-tuned models, self-hosted models, or models that Weave doesn’t automatically integrate with, configure Weave to track custom costs using available API methods.

The Weave TypeScript doesn’t support cost tracking.

Use automatic cost tracking

When you call weave.init() and use a supported LLM integration such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, or Mistral, Weave automatically records token usage and calculates cost for each call. Costs appear in the trace tree and in the calls table in the Weave UI. They’re also available programmatically under call.summary["weave"]["costs"] when you query calls with the include_costs parameter set to true. Automatic cost tracking requires two conditions:

The LLM provider is a supported integration.
The API response includes token usage (most providers return this by default).

If either condition isn’t met, use custom cost tracking instead. The following example shows how to retrieve automatic cost data programmatically:

import weave
from openai import OpenAI

weave.init("your-team/project-name")
client = OpenAI()

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o-mini",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "What is 2 + 2?"}],
)

import time
time.sleep(2)

# Retrieve the current instance of the Weave client
weave_client = weave.get_client()
# Access the calls for the instance and their costs
calls = list(weave_client.get_calls(include_costs=True, limit=1))
call = calls[0]

# Access the call summary and retrieve the available costs fields
costs = call.summary.get("weave", {}).get("costs", {})
if not costs:
    print("No costs found in summary.weave.costs")
for model, cost in costs.items():
    print(f"Model: {model}")
    print(f"  Input cost:  ${cost['prompt_tokens_total_cost']:.6f}")
    print(f"  Output cost: ${cost['completion_tokens_total_cost']:.6f}")

Add a custom cost

Use custom cost tracking when automatic cost tracking isn’t available, such as with fine-tuned models, self-hosted models, or providers that Weave doesn’t integrate with. The following sections describe how to add, query, purge, and aggregate custom costs. Add a custom cost with the add_cost method. The three required fields are llm_id, prompt_token_cost, and completion_token_cost. llm_id is the name of the LLM (for example, gpt-4o). prompt_token_cost and completion_token_cost are the cost per token for the LLM. If the LLM prices are specified per million tokens, convert the value. You can also set effective_date to a datetime to make the cost effective at a specific date. This defaults to the current date.

import weave
from datetime import datetime

client = weave.init("your-team/project-name")

client.add_cost(
    llm_id="your_model_name",
    prompt_token_cost=0.01,
    completion_token_cost=0.02
)

client.add_cost(
    llm_id="your_model_name",
    prompt_token_cost=10,
    completion_token_cost=20,
    effective_date=datetime(2025, 4, 22),
)

Query custom costs

After adding custom costs, you can retrieve them to verify their values or to look up the cost ID needed for other operations such as purging. Query for costs with the query_costs method. You can query for costs in a few ways: pass in a single cost ID, or a list of LLM model names.

import weave

client = weave.init("your-team/project-name")

costs = client.query_costs(llm_ids=["your_model_name"])

cost = client.query_costs(costs[0].id)

Purge a custom cost

Purge a custom cost with the purge_costs method. Pass in a list of cost IDs, and Weave purges the costs with those IDs.

import weave

client = weave.init("your-team/project-name")

costs = client.query_costs(llm_ids=["your_model_name"])
client.purge_costs([cost.id for cost in costs])

Calculate custom costs for a project

To understand the total spend across a project, aggregate the per-call costs returned by Weave. Calculate costs for a project with get_calls() and include_costs=True.

import weave

weave.init("your-team/project-name")

@weave.op()
def get_costs_for_project(project_name: str):
    total_cost = 0
    requests = 0

    client = weave.init(project_name)
    calls = list(
        client.get_calls(filter={"trace_roots_only": True}, include_costs=True)
    )

    for call in calls:
        if call.summary["weave"] is not None and call.summary["weave"].get("costs", None) is not None:
            for k, cost in call.summary["weave"]["costs"].items():
                requests += cost["requests"]
                total_cost += cost["prompt_tokens_total_cost"]
                total_cost += cost["completion_tokens_total_cost"]

    return {
        "total_cost": total_cost,
        "requests": requests,
        "calls": len(calls),
    }

get_costs_for_project("my_custom_cost_model")

Set up a custom model with custom costs

For an end-to-end walkthrough that combines a custom model with custom cost tracking, try the cookbook for setting up costs with a custom model.

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Reference

Details & Support

Use automatic cost tracking

Add a custom cost

Query custom costs

Purge a custom cost

Calculate custom costs for a project

Set up a custom model with custom costs

Try in Colab

​Use automatic cost tracking

​Add a custom cost

​Query custom costs

​Purge a custom cost

​Calculate custom costs for a project

​Set up a custom model with custom costs

Try in Colab

Use automatic cost tracking

Add a custom cost

Query custom costs

Purge a custom cost

Calculate custom costs for a project

Set up a custom model with custom costs