---
url: https://simpledatalogs.com/docs/guide/spend.md
description: >-
  Price what you pay per call, such as an LLM or SMS API, and see the spend by
  day, deployment and price line from exact counts.
---

# Spend

Your events often stand for something you pay for: a call to an LLM, an SMS, a lookup in a paid API. The **Spend** tab turns those events into money, so you can see what you spent, when, and where it came from.

For example: $4 spent in the last 4 days across web and apps, with the iOS app 60% of it.

## Set prices

Owners set prices in the **Prices** dialog on an environment's **Spend** tab. Before any price exists, the tab shows **Add a price**; afterwards, the **Prices** button beside the range opens the same dialog.

Each price table has one event, split by one or two of its properties, and one line per value:

* **Event:** the event you pay for, such as `llm_call`, or **Any event** to price log lines and events alike.
* **Split by:** the property that decides the cost, such as `model`. Use **+ add a second split** for a second property, such as `country` for `sms_sent`. The lists show the properties the environment has seen; before there are any, type the name.
* **Lines:** pick a value, then type its cost per call. For `llm_call` split by `model`, that is `large` at `0.002` and `small` at `0.0004`. **Other value…** lets you type a value the environment hasn't sent yet. **+ Add a line** adds another.
* **Currency:** the small list next to **Save prices**. USD is the default.

The dialog opens with the busiest event, its first property and its busiest value filled in, so most tables only need a cost. A line missing its value or cost is marked when you save, and nothing changes until every line reads. Each value, or pair of values, has one line, and a table holds up to 500 lines.

Values match exactly. Calls whose values have no line are counted as "no price" and cost nothing; **Add one** under **By price line** opens the dialog with a new line for the busiest of them.

Members and viewers open the same dialog to read the prices, but can't change them.

## Read the spend

The tab follows the range and deployment tabs like the dashboard:

* **Spend** for the range, with its change against the previous period of the same length.
* **Calls:** the priced calls in the range.
* **Biggest driver:** the deployment with the most spend on the All tab, or the price line with the most spend on a deployment's tab, with its share.
* **Spend per day** (per hour for Today) as bars.
* **By deployment** on the All tab: the top five deployments by spend and their share of the total.
* **By price line:** each line's values, calls, spend and share, and how many calls had no price.

**How it works** next to the Prices button plays a short demo of the steps above.

Spend is exact: each combination's deduplicated count times its unit cost, added up without rounding. The same numbers are available to AI assistants through the [`spend_summary`](/mcp/tools#spend-summary) tool.