A free token allowance only becomes a real decision input once you can count tokens on your own side of the wire, per task, without waiting for a vendor dashboard to catch up.

That sentence is the whole argument, and everything below is the machinery that makes it true. If you cannot attribute spend to a task, then "free tier or self-hosted?" stays a vibe instead of an answer. So let me show you the smallest ledger I would accept before making that call, plus a fence that stops a runaway agent before it eats a whole allowance in one afternoon.

Quick context on the allowance itself: MonkeyCode currently offers free model access, and the operator's figure at the time of writing is on the order of ten million tokens, alongside a free server option.…