See what an AI task will cost before it runs
It is Thursday morning and the allowance you expected to last the week is gone, used up overnight by a background AI task you started yesterday and forgot about. With Octuo, you see a cost preview before a turn runs and a cost report after it, so you see a number before you decide, not only after. Octuo does the preparing, delegating and following up around the task, and the go-ahead stays with you.
What Octuo does at that moment
- Before a turn runs, Octuo shows a cost preview, so you can decide whether to go ahead.
- After every turn, it reports what that turn cost.
- When it hands work to a supported tool such as Codex or Claude Code, the work runs through your own authorised accounts and each service's terms. Those providers bill you separately from Octuo.
- Octuo follows the work and reports back. Progress is there whenever you want to check, decisions that need you come to Attention, and you step in only for sign-ins and approvals that must be yours.
Octuo is credit-based, and the costs it shows are in OC (Octuo Credits); our pricing page has the details.
Three examples
These are illustrative situations, not customer stories.
A research job, previewed before it starts
Someone preparing a market summary asks Octuo to research a broad topic across many sources and write it up. Before the first turn runs, Octuo shows the cost preview. It looks bigger than they expected, so they narrow the question to one region and then say go. The decision to start was theirs, made with the number in front of them.
The cost after a weekly report
A freelancer has Octuo draft a client report each week from a folder of notes. After each turn, Octuo reports what it cost. The next time the report comes due, they have a figure to judge the routine by, and can repeat it as it is or change the request. Nothing about the report itself needed their attention, so they only looked at the cost.
Octuo's cost and a connected service's bill
A developer hands a refactoring task to Codex through Octuo, using their own Codex account, which they signed in to themselves. The cost Octuo reports is Octuo's own. What the Codex account uses is billed by its provider, separately and under that provider's terms, so the developer reads the two as two things instead of expecting one total.
What it does not do
Showing a cost is not the same as limiting it: we do not claim Octuo will stop a task at a spending limit, so the go-ahead stays with you. The preview is made before the work runs, Octuo does not control what other services charge, and we are not telling you tasks are cheap, only that you can see the number.
FAQ
Is the preview exact? No. It is a preview made before the work runs, so use it as a guide for deciding whether to go ahead. The cost reported after the turn is the figure that counts.
Does Octuo's cost cover what Claude Code and Codex charge? No. Those tools run under your own accounts and each service's terms, and their providers bill you separately from Octuo. Octuo's figures do not stand in for those bills.
If I have already hit an allowance, does this help? It looks forward, not back: Octuo previews a turn before it runs and reports its cost after. A limit on a connected service sits with that provider, and our post on what to do when you hit your usage limit covers the next step.
See what Octuo does. Octuo is in public beta on macOS and web, and an iPhone app is coming soon. New accounts get 1,000 OC trial credits, once per person, no card.
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