chai-meter

A taxi meter for your Claude Code session, in the status line:

☕ $0.42 · ≈ 1.8 chai

The meter jumps when a request goes out and ticks up while the response streams. When the response ends, it settles on the real usage. After each turn it lines up with Claude Code's own cost ledger.

/chai prints the breakdown:

☕ This session: $0.74 ≈ 3.1 chai (₹62 at ₹20 a cup, $1 = ₹84)
  input              1,500 tokens     $0.01
  output            32,000 tokens     $0.64
  cache write       10,000 tokens     $0.05
  cache read       200,000 tokens     $0.04
  Priced with the table in hooks/prices.ts.
Priciest turn: $0.64, "now rewrite the whole billing module in Rust ple…"
All time: $10.74 ≈ 45 chai

The session total is kept in $.state, so a reload doesn't reset it. The all-time total is kept in $.store and carries across sessions.

Install

claude --plugin-dir ./chai-meter

or add this repo as a marketplace and install it with /plugin.

Options

| Option | Default | What it does | | --- | --- | --- | | chaiPriceInr | 20 | Rupees per cup of chai. | | usdToInr | 84 | Rupees per US dollar. | | priceOverrides | "" | JSON of model id to [input, output, cache write, cache read] dollars per million tokens, e.g. {"claude-opus-5-5": [4, 20, 5, 0.2]}. Rows you leave out keep the built-in prices. |

The built-in prices live in hooks/prices.ts, one row per model. They are Anthropic API list prices as of 2026-09-25, so update them when prices change. Wherever Claude Code keeps a cost ledger, the session total comes from that ledger. The table only prices the live tick and the per-kind and per-turn rows. A model with no row is priced at Opus 5.5 rates, and /chai says so.

How it works

A streaming turn.step hook estimates the response as it arrives: the previous request's input cost, plus about four characters per output token. It then adds the response's real usage, priced from the table. Each session.measure sets the base to Claude Code's own cost.usd. turn.start and turn.complete attribute cost to each turn so /chai can name the priciest one.