Metering the Code You Did Not Write

Agentic systems make cost attribution difficult because a single user task can involve multiple billable calls to model providers, MCP servers, partner APIs, and internal services, many of which are outside an organization’s control and cannot be instrumented with an SDK. The proposed solution is to meter traffic at a gateway or proxy through which all requests pass, allowing it to capture customer and team identity, destination, model or tool usage, token counts, outcomes, and latency without requiring cooperation from upstream services. Effective attribution also depends on propagating a run identifier across all downstream calls and resolving identity at the edge, linking otherwise separate events to a specific agent run and customer. MCP tool calls should be treated as billable usage because their costs can vary substantially, while proxy-based metering enables per-run budgets, step limits to prevent loops, tool-specific pricing, and the ability to reject requests before additional spending occurs.

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