Budget and consent

Every round is paid for on your keys. askround makes the cost visible before the round, and keeps the decision with you.

Before a round: the estimate and the cap

askround estimates a round from the number of calls, the tokens a searched answer usually takes and each provider’s prices, and prints it before anything is sent. A round estimated above the cap is refused:

askround ask "..." --max-cost 0.50      # or ASKROUND_MAX_COST, or max_cost over MCP
askround run modelado.toml --estimate-only

After it, the report gives the actual cost per provider from the usage each API reported, the extraction pass included. The prices are a dated table in the package; ASKROUND_PRICES names a JSON file that replaces any of them.

A budget an agent cannot raise

Set what askround may spend in its config file, %APPDATA%\askround\config.toml on Windows and ~/.config/askround/config.toml elsewhere (or the file ASKROUND_CONFIG names):

[budget]
day = 1.00     # USD
month = 10.00

Every saved round adds its actual cost to spent.jsonl beside the rounds. A run whose estimate would pass the day’s or the month’s budget is refused before any call, as a request for your approval: you run it with --approve, or raise the budget. No MCP tool offers either, and every paid result an agent gets says what has been spent against the budget. askround budget shows it. Days and months are counted in UTC.

The same question twice costs once

A question asked again the same way within a day returns the stored round and calls no provider. --fresh asks anew; the window is in the config file:

[reuse]
max_age_hours = 24   # 0 turns reuse off

What a question may not carry

One round sends the same text to every provider. A question that carries an email address, a phone number, a CPF, an IP address, an API key, or a name on your own list (ASKROUND_PRIVATE, or the file ASKROUND_PRIVATE_FILE names) stops before anything is sent, naming the question and what it found.