Costs and limits

Preview without spending

Facade dryRun() and Artisan --dry-run resolve selection and estimates locally. They make no provider calls and store no Run. They do not test authentication or guarantee a provider’s current availability.

How a cap selects sources

maxCost('0.10') and Artisan --max-cost=0.10 set a USD admission cap. Admission uses shared catalog order, not request order or cheapest-first order.

Estimate	Admission
No bounded estimate	Skip as unpriced
Fits remaining budget	Select
Exceeds remaining budget	Skip as over_budget; consider later sources

Illustrative selection

A $0.10 cap with catalog-ordered estimates of $0.06, $0.05, and $0.03 selects the first and third sources. This is not a price quote.

Unpriced and already-started work

Without a cap, unpriced sources may run and the total estimate can be null. PHP executes selected sources sequentially; reported spend and reservations stop unstarted work when the budget is used, without replacing failed sources.

A cap is not a final-bill guarantee

In-flight work can exceed a cap. Failed, interrupted, or timed-out calls can still bill. Local timeout and worker termination do not cancel provider work. Keep the Run ID and recover the existing attempt before considering a new paid request. See recovery and queue deadlines.

Read money and unknowns

Money is an exact USD decimal string. Estimates do not fill in missing charges.

Field	Meaning
cost.estimated	Estimate, not a receipt
cost.reported	Provider-reported spend only; null means unknown, never zero
cost.complete	Requires every result to report a cost

Pricing and separate budgets

Estimates come from jkudish/laravel-ai-pricing. Pricing synchronization is explicit, not a dry-run side effect. Your SDK agent’s model calls have a separate budget from Librarium research. Your application owns authorization and total spend limits across repeated requests.

Examples and approval

Output labelled Illustrative shows a possible response shape, not a captured result or a current price. Preview before spending, obtain approval for agent-initiated paid calls, and keep keys out of chat and source control.