What is this costing us?
Live spend by developer, model, repo and tool — including subscription seats, not just API tokens. "The migration cost £1.4k in AI this month" becomes a sentence you can say out loud.
Seat & spend intelligence
For AI coding tools
Know your team’s
headroom.
- Signal
- OpenTelemetry metrics
- Path
- Out of band, read-only
- Install
- Two environment variables
- Home
- Hosted or your own tin
Headroom shows what Claude Code and friends cost per developer, repo and model — and which plan each seat should actually be on. Read-only, out of your request path, running in five minutes.
Request early access
You’re on the list. First invites go to small teams running Claude Code today.
From the author of ksred.com — the Claude Code pricing and cost-tracking guides.
HR-1 · platform-eng
budget £1,800 / mo
CLIP ci-agent · infra-migration · £74 since 02:14 · out of hours
otel · read-only · metrics only
marc — seat unused 19 days
01
Built for the budget owner
Three questions.
Three questions.
Answered, not charted.
Dashboards report. Headroom recommends. It exists for the engineering manager who signs the renewal, not the SRE who tunes the collector.
Is every seat worth it?
Utilisation per seat, flagged before the renewal date, not after. One ghost seat at $125 a month pays for Headroom several times over.
What changes at renewal?
A per-developer recommendation — API, Pro, Max 5×, Max 20× or a Team seat — built from real volume and limit-hit data. Export it, forward it to finance, done.
02
Installation
Two environment variables. Five minutes.
Claude Code already emits OpenTelemetry. Headroom is just the endpoint that turns it into answers — no Grafana, no PromQL, no agent to deploy.
Step 01
Point Claude Code at Headroom
Two lines in your team’s shell profile, or one MDM policy.
# ~/.zshrc, or your MDM config
CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://app.getheadroom.co
CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_TELEMETRY=1
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://app.getheadroom.co
That’s the install
Step 02
Metrics flow, read-only
Token counts, costs, models, session and repo attributes. Never prompts, never code, never in the request path. Nothing changes about how anyone works, and nothing breaks if we go down.
Step 03
Get answers, not charts
Spend meters per seat, budgets with clip alerts in Slack, and the renewal report — from the first day of data. No dashboard to build.
03
What you get
The instrument panel for AI coding spend.
Flagship
The plan optimiser & renewal report
Headroom watches real usage against every plan’s economics and limits, then tells you — per developer — what each seat should be on. The output is a one-page report your finance team actually reads.
Headroom · renewal reportplatform-eng · Aug 2026
amaraMax 20×→Max 5×peak 41% of limit
devPro→Max 5×hit limits 9×
tomMax 5×→holdwell matched
marcTeam seat→removeunused 19 days
Net change−£174 / mo
01
Budgets & clip alerts
Set a monthly budget per team or repo. Spikes, out-of-hours agent runs and unfamiliar repos raise a clip alert in Slack before the invoice does.
02
Per-repo attribution
Spend rolls up by repository and project from the telemetry’s own attributes. Cost per initiative, without manual tagging.
03
Privacy by architecture
Metrics only — no prompts, no code, no keystrokes. Aggregate views by default and no productivity leaderboards. Works-council friendly.
04
Multi-tool, over time
Claude Code first. Codex, Copilot and Gemini CLI importers follow — one neutral view no single vendor will ever give you.
04
Run it your way
One binary. Two homes.
Option A · Hosted
We run it
Paste an endpoint, watch the meters move.
- Data in five minutes, no infrastructure
- EU hosting, metrics-only retention
- Slack alerts, weekly digest, renewal reports
- Per-seat pricing, cancel any time
Option B · Self-hosted
Your tin, your rules
The same single Go binary, plus a licence key.
- Telemetry never leaves your network
- Postgres you already run; docker or systemd
- No phone-home, no seat beacon
- Annual licence, updates included
05
Pricing
Cheaper than one wrong seat.
| Edition | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| HostedFree | £0 | One seat, 30-day history |
| HostedTeam | £6 / seat / mo | Minimum 5 seats, unlimited history |
| HostedBusiness | £12 / seat / mo | SSO, API access, priority support |
| Self-hostedTeam | £490 / year | Up to 25 seats, updates included |
| Self-hostedScale | £990 / year | Up to 100 seats |
A premium AI coding seat runs $100–125 a month. Headroom finding one unused seat, or one developer on the wrong plan, covers a year of either edition.
Fig. 03 · Ready reckoner
Set your team size.
Developers
AI coding seats, per year
£24,000
Headroom hosted Team, per year
£1,440
Pays for itself at
2 wrong seats
Assumes £100 per developer per month for a premium AI coding seat. Self-hosted works out cheaper above roughly 7 developers.