Proof of concept

Note

This validation was recorded against hermes-telemetry v0.2.0 on a development gateway. It is kept as a worked example of the capture, pricing, and budget flow. Current behavior is described in Budgets and Pricing; in particular, enforcement is a tool gate, so a model response already in flight still completes and is billed.

Setup

• Hermes gateway on Linux (WSL), default model openrouter/owl-alpha (free tier).
• hermes-telemetry v0.2.0, loaded in the gateway process, with six cron jobs configured and two used for this run.

Pricing capture

Models were added to pricing.yaml:

models:
  "openrouter/owl-alpha":
    input: 0.00
    output: 0.00
  "openrouter/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6":
    input: 3.00
    output: 15.00
    cache_read: 0.30
    cache_write: 3.75
  "openrouter/anthropic/claude-opus-4-7":
    input: 5.00
    output: 25.00
    cache_read: 0.50
    cache_write: 6.25

on_estimated.mode was set to enforce for deterministic enforcement.

Budget enforcement test

Step 1: trigger a hard breach. With global.daily_usd: 0.001, the MCP Lead Gen job (claude-sonnet-4-6) spent $0.1812 on its first run, which is 18,120% of the daily limit. That is a hard breach, and in v0.2.0 the job was paused. Current versions pause a job only when its own cron_job budget is breached; a global breach blocks tool calls but does not pause jobs. See Budgets.

█ global    $0.1812 / $0.00    18120%  [daily]
                         ↑ 0.001 rounded to 0.00 in the display

Step 2: raise the limit.

/budget set global daily 2.00

global    $0.1812 / $2.00    9%  [daily]

Step 3: verify the job runs normally. MCP Lead Gen re-ran successfully under the $2.00 daily budget, with state: scheduled and paused_at: null.

Cron job cost comparison

Job	Model	Price (input / output)
MCP Lead Gen	claude-sonnet-4-6	$3.00 / $15.00 per 1M tokens
Marketing Highlights	claude-opus-4-7	$5.00 / $25.00 per 1M tokens
Base sessions (CLI)	owl-alpha	$0.00 / $0.00 (free)

Results from SQLite after all runs:

• CLI sessions (owl-alpha, free): about 1M tokens in, costing $0.00.
• MCP Lead Gen (claude-sonnet-4-6): about 892K tokens in, costing $0.314.
• Marketing Highlights (claude-opus-4-7): about 445K tokens in, costing $2.23.

Results

Component	Result
Token capture from the provider	Real usage (estimated=0)
Cost estimation with the pricing table	Accurate to the pricing YAML
Cron job session tracking	Captured through the session_id pattern
Budget soft alerts	One-time context injection
Budget hard enforcement	Job paused at $0.001 per day (v0.2.0 result; current behavior differs, see Budgets)
Budget hot reload through /budget set	Cache cleared, new limit active
Multi-model cost comparison	Sonnet, Opus, and free tier compared
Pricing auto-refresh (OpenRouter API)	320 models fetched, manual overrides preserved
Estimated-price model handling	Negative prices normalized to $0.00, with budget degradation