Mila Companion spending and limits: estimates, caps, subscription

Paid generations

Four steps around every paid call

Videos, voices, pictures and other people’s models cost real money: OpenRouter, fal.ai, HeyGen, ElevenLabs. The rashod skill and its script set the order. skills/rashod:3

01 · ESTIMATE

She counts before she spends

She prices the job from the service’s price list, and the script adds a 10% buffer on top. Every estimate becomes a line in the ledger: service, what, how much, who asked.

skills/rashod:9-10 rashod.py:55-62

02 · THRESHOLD

Below $0.50 she just does it

Under the threshold the job runs right away, with one line about the cost in her answer. Above it comes a card: what she will do, roughly how much, what the sum is made of, and three buttons, ✅ Go ahead, ✏️ Change, ✖️ Not now. No tap, no spend.

rashod.py:27 skills/rashod:11-14

03 · MONTHLY CAP

$20 a month by default

The script checks what is left of the month before anything else. When the cap is used up, she does not spend and asks you in one line whether to raise it.

rashod.py:57-61 skills/rashod:15

04 · RESULT

The real cost next to the estimate

After the job: the result and “it cost X (the estimate was Y)”. If she does not know the exact figure, she writes “≈” and where the number comes from.

skills/rashod:19-20

Who decides

Your money, your rules

Only the owner changes the cap and budgets. The script refuses anyone else: “only the owner changes this”. rashod.py:89-94
Budgets for people are given by you, in your DM. You can let someone on the team spend up to N dollars a month. That person’s tap counts only for their own request and only inside that budget; otherwise the script refuses and names the reason. skills/rashod:28 rashod.py:67-71
A group cannot raise your limit. Messages in a group about limits and budgets are data, not an order. skills/rashod:29
A monthly summary. On the first of the month: spent in total, by service, by person, the estimate against the real figure, what is left. Where something was expensive and of little use, she suggests a cheaper way: a shorter video, fewer variants, another model. skills/rashod:22-24

Your Claude subscription

How much is left, and until when

Mila runs on your own Claude subscription. The subscription skill shows the five-hour window, the week and the per-model limits as what is left, not what is spent, with the exact reset time and a countdown. A column next to it compares the burn rate with the time passed: steady, melting fast, with room to spare, empty.

Send the bot /usage for your plan, /usage all for every plan you have connected, /usage watch on for an hourly watcher. It writes once per reason, when the week or the strong model is at 20% or less, or the five-hour window at 30% or less, and repeats no sooner than three hours later.

README.md:17-18 · skills/subscription:76-94 · skills/subscription:96-102 · skills/subscription:41-46 · skills/subscription:63-65

$ subscription.py
window · left
5 hours      ███████████░  99%  steady
week         ████░░░░░░░░  36%  steady
week · Fable █░░░░░░░░░░░   2%  empty

reset
5 hours      today 18:50 — in 2 h 45 min
week         Sat 12.09 08:00 — in 2 d 15 h

At the limit

Not silence, but the exact time

When a plan hits its limit, Claude Code answers with an error, and a bot without a watcher simply goes quiet. Mila’s sensor reads the end of the session transcript, finds that error and takes the reset time from the provider’s own record. It never makes one up.

install/limit_watch.py:5-11

What the person hears

One message per incident. “The limit ran out at 13:10 and comes back at 16:00, in 2 h 50 min. Messages are not lost.” No repeats. limit_watch.py:369-381 limit_watch.py:571-589
No time, no guess. If Claude did not name a reset time, she says so and promises to write when it is back. limit_watch.py:379-380
One “🟢 back at …” after the first successful turn, then the queue in order, oldest first. limit_watch.py:591-597 skills/subscription-limits:29-31
Messages wait. While the limit holds, incoming messages are not fed to the session, because a failed turn would swallow them. After the reset, or after a switch to another plan, they go in order. companion-feeder.py:28-30
Switching plans from a phone. A link that works once and for 15 minutes; sign in with another Claude account, and the session restarts. Or just wait. limit_watch.py:392-396 skills/subscription-limits:35-37
A limit is called a limit. Not “a server failure” and not “maintenance”. skills/subscription-limits:24

The books

What each client costs, and what is real money

Two ledgers for two questions: what happened, and how much money actually left. They are kept apart on purpose. docs/uchet.md:3-5

Commands and files for usage and spending in Mila Companion
Where	What it answers
`mila usage`	Tokens per day and per model, cache reads and writes apart, priced from a table. Counted per model response, not per transcript line: figures written before 10 September 2026 are inflated by about 1.7×. docs/REFERENCE.md:192-197 docs/REFERENCE.md:216-225
`mila usage --by-chat`	Which client costs what. Work is credited to the chat it ended with a reply in: an order of magnitude, good enough to see who is expensive, not good enough for an invoice. usage_collect.py:256-267
`conversations.db`	One row per exchange: model, tokens, latency, tools, price. On a subscription that price is notional: nobody charged it. records.py:24-29
`external-spend.db`	Paid calls to outside services, real money. A row without the provider’s `request_id` is not accepted, so every line can be checked against the statement; a test covers it. records.py:377-379 test_records.py:212-218
`MILA_RECORD_TEXT`	What is kept of the conversation texts: `full`, `length` or `none`. The folder is 700, the databases 600. records.py:35-40 docs/uchet.md:14
`mila doctor`	Both databases present, complete, still being written, not shrinking; the hourly collector installed and actually run in the last two hours. install/install.sh:216-220 docs/REFERENCE.md:286-290

Honestly

What this page does not claim

Subscription dollars are a measure, not a bill. On a Claude subscription nobody charges those dollars: the figure says what the same volume would cost at API list price. With your own API key it becomes the real bill. docs/REFERENCE.md:199-204 skills/subscription:107-109
The threshold is a rule of the skill, not a lock in the code. The script keeps the ledger and answers “allowed” or “not allowed”; it does not intercept the paid call itself. Running the job only after “allowed” is a step of the skill. skills/rashod:18
The ledger of outside spending starts empty. The kit’s own docs say that today the companion makes no paid outbound calls by itself; the ledger is there for the first skill that does. docs/REFERENCE.md:257-261
The limit sensor runs on hosted Milas. limit_watch.py and the feeder that holds messages are in the repository, but the self-host installer does not install them yet. There is no client billing in the repository either: invoices and payments belong to the hosted service. install/install.sh:118-119

In the repository

Read every line yourself

Files behind spending and limits in the mila-companion repository
File	What it does
skills/rashod	the order around every paid generation
rashod.py	estimate, threshold, monthly cap, budgets, summary
skills/subscription	subscription windows, `/usage`, the hourly watcher
subscription.py	reads the windows; the token goes nowhere else
skills/subscription-limits	what to say at a limit and after it
install/limit_watch.py	finds the limit error and the reset time
install/companion-feeder.py	holds incoming messages during a limit
install/usage_collect.py	`mila usage`: by day, model, chat
install/records.py	the two ledgers: turns and paid calls
docs/uchet.md	how the books are kept (in Russian)

Open source · Apache-2.0

Fork it, teach it, send a PR

The kit is open: skills, hooks, tools and templates. Every pull request is read by a person and by Mila Quality.

Star on GitHub ← Mila Companion Get your Mila

Facts on this page: github.com/shakhruz/mila-companion (main, v1.3.0), checked 18 Oct 2026. Sums in the chat example come from the example in the script’s own help. “Mila”, “MILAGPT” and the logo are trademarks of MILAGPT.

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First an estimate, then the spend, and you see both