Developer releases Tare to diagnose 'hidden' token costs in Claude Code
The open-source tool analyzes local session logs to help users identify why AI agent quotas are depleting rapidly.
Developer kelviq has released Tare, an open-source forensics tool designed to help users of Claude Code diagnose the causes of rapid token consumption. The tool allows developers to identify whether their usage limits are being driven by direct user input, background tool execution, or the cumulative cost of context re-sending.
Tare operates by analyzing local Claude Code session logs directly on the user's machine, ensuring no data leaves the local environment. According to the project's GitHub repository, the tool deduplicates API responses to provide accurate totals, noting that naive counting methods can inflate usage totals by as much as 86%. A key feature of the tool is its ability to calculate the "real cost of context" by attributing the cost of re-sending large files—read early in a session—to the tools that triggered those subsequent requests.
The challenge of context bloat
Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI agent, maintains detailed logs of every request made during a session. However, users frequently struggle to understand why their quotas, including the five-hour rolling window, are depleted so quickly. This is largely because the cost of context is cumulative; as an agent reads more files and grows its history, every subsequent turn becomes more expensive, a cost that is often hidden from the user in real-time.
Why visibility matters
As AI agents transition from simple chat interfaces to autonomous CLI tools capable of reading entire repositories, "context bloat" has become a primary driver of cost and rate-limiting. By providing visibility into these hidden expenses, Tare enables developers to optimize their workflows—such as utilizing the `/clear` command to reset context—and identify buggy automations that may be spawning excessive sessions.
Kelviq noted that the primary expense of a session is often the "container," referring to context that is sent repeatedly, which is the specific cost Tare aims to isolate.
Getting started
Tare is installed as a skill within Claude Code, which allows users to query their quota and usage patterns using plain English. Installation is handled via a single command: `npx skills add kelviq/tare -g -y --copy --agent claude-code`.