AI costs, billing,
and attribution.

Claude Code bills average $150–$250 per developer per month. Without cost monitoring by project and client, dev agencies eat that margin silently on fixed-price contracts. Here's what attribution actually looks like.

Anthropic's own data puts average Claude Code usage at $150–250 per developer per month — and most of that cost lands in agency overhead with zero attribution to the client work that drove it.

Fixed-price contracts create a margin trap: AI costs go up with project complexity, but the contract price doesn't. Here's how agencies are recovering those costs — before and after signing.

Claude Code costs compound in ways that aren't obvious until the invoice arrives — context window growth, model selection, agent loops, and cache efficiency all interact to drive costs higher than expected.

Your team uses both — Claude Code for agentic work, Cursor for day-to-day coding. Anthropic invoices separately, Cursor invoices separately, and neither tells you what either tool cost on any specific project.

Between March and April 2026, a cluster of bugs caused Claude Code token consumption to spike ~40% with no warning — and agencies on fixed-price contracts absorbed the cost before they knew it was happening.

The spreadsheet approach to AI cost tracking fails every time — it requires developers to interrupt their workflow to maintain accounting records they can't fill in accurately anyway.