Token usage and costs

AI Observatory normalizes provider usage into independent nullable categories:

• Input tokens.
• Output tokens.
• Cached input tokens.
• Reasoning tokens.
• Total tokens.

Unavailable values remain null where the SDK allows that distinction. Laravel AI's current Usage object may normalize some missing provider categories to zero, so an upstream zero cannot always be distinguished from a provider value that was not exposed.

Trace aggregation#

For agent traces, totals are aggregated from model spans only. Agent-level usage is not added again, preventing double counting.

For standalone AI operations, totals are aggregated from spans that report usage.

Estimated costs#

Costs are calculated only when the local pricing catalog contains a matching provider and model with every required rate.

Unknown, incomplete, invalid, or mixed-currency pricing produces null. Unpriced usage is never shown as free usage.

See Configuring the pricing catalog for a complete example.