AI Team Budget Planner
Forecast your engineering team's monthly AI spend from team size and usage profiles.
Team size: 8 developers · assumes 70% prompt-cache hit rate.
per month for 8 developers on Claude Sonnet 4.5 — $11,862.14 over the next 12 months at 15%/quarter growth.
| Profile | Devs | $/dev/mo | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| heavy | 2 | $231.22 | $462.44 |
| medium | 4 | $68.03 | $272.13 |
| light | 2 | $10.34 | $20.69 |
12-month projection
Suggested budget alert: $1,132.90/mo (1.5× expected — catches runaways before invoice day).
How it works
This planner forecasts a team's monthly AI coding spend from the thing that actually drives it: how many developers you have in each usage band. Set the number of heavy, medium and light users, pick your primary model, and the planner computes per-developer monthly cost, a team total, and a 12-month projection with compounding quarterly growth. The "copy budget memo" button produces a markdown table you can paste straight into a finance doc.
The profile assumptions are visible, not hidden. A heavy user is modeled as 120 calls/day at 30k input + 2k output tokens per call — an agent-driven workflow resending project context all day. Medium is 50 calls at 20k/1.5k; light is 12 calls at 12k/1k. All three assume a 70% prompt-cache hit rate, which is typical for agentic tools that resend stable prefixes (the planner drops to 0% automatically for models without cache pricing). Costs use a 30.44-day month and per-million-token rates verified on 2026-06-11.
The 12-month chart compounds your quarterly growth rate monthly. Growth is the number most teams get wrong in both directions: they overestimate headcount growth and underestimate per-developer usage growth as agentic workflows take hold. Fifteen percent per quarter — the default — means the December bill is roughly 1.7× January's with zero hiring. The suggested alert threshold is 1.5× the expected month: tight enough to catch a runaway agent loop or a retry storm, loose enough not to page anyone for a busy sprint.
What a planner cannot do is tell you which band each developer is really in, or notice when a medium user quietly becomes a heavy one. Those are measurement problems. FORG attributes real token spend to every developer and repository as it happens, so the profile counts in this tool stop being estimates — and the budget memo you copy today can be checked against measured reality next month. The share link preserves your exact scenario for the planning discussion.
Frequently asked questions
What does a typical developer spend on AI coding tools per month?
It varies by an order of magnitude within one team. A heavy user driving an agent all day on a frontier model runs hundreds of dollars a month in raw token spend; an occasional user asking a few questions a day might be under twenty. That spread is why this planner models three profiles instead of one average — averages hide the power users who dominate the bill.
Should I budget per-seat or per-usage for AI tools?
Per-seat pricing gives finance predictability but overcharges light users and caps nothing for heavy ones if overages apply. Pay-per-use tracks reality but makes the monthly number a surprise. Most teams want a hybrid: a seat-shaped budget per developer with a hard cap, which is the model FORG enforces. Our seat-vs-usage simulator compares both at your team's scale.
How should I forecast usage growth?
Token usage per developer grows as agentic workflows take hold — teams adopting agent-driven coding commonly see per-dev consumption rise 10-25% per quarter for the first year, because each developer delegates more and larger tasks. The growth slider compounds quarterly. Re-forecast every quarter from measured data rather than trusting any 12-month straight-line projection.
How do I actually enforce a budget instead of just forecasting it?
A forecast is a memo; enforcement needs telemetry and a cutoff. You need per-developer spend attribution in near-real-time, an alert threshold below invoice-shock level, and ideally hard caps per seat. That is FORG's job: it tracks every session's spend per developer and repo, alerts at your threshold, and applies hard budget caps — $15/dev/month flat.
Budgeting AI spend for a team? FORG is $15/dev with hard budget caps and per-seat attribution.
See FORG pricing