How to Track and Control AI Coding Assistant Costs Before They Spiral

The bill arrived, and it was ugly. I'd been happily using AI-powered code completion across three projects — a React dashboard, a Go microservice, and a Python data pipeline. Everything felt great until I looked at the monthly invoice and realized my team's AI tooling costs had quietly tripled. The shift toward usage-based billing for AI coding tools means this is going to happen to a lot more developers. Let's talk about why AI assistant costs sneak up on you, and more importantly, how to get t