Free Plugin: See Exactly Which WordPress Plugins Are Spending Your AI Budget

WordPress 7.0 made one decision that changed the economics of every plugin on your site: a single AI provider key, configured once in Settings → Connectors, shared by everything. It’s a genuinely good design — and it shipped with no meter. Core’s request log will tell you that AI calls happened. It will not tell you which plugin made them, what they cost, or that one of them quietly burned through your budget on Tuesday night.

Today we’re releasing the tool we kept wishing existed while writing about that gap: AI Spend Monitor, a free WordPress plugin that answers the question core can’t — which plugin is spending your money?

What it does

Activate it and it starts recording. No API keys, no account, no configuration. From the next AI call onward, you get a dashboard under Axtolab → AI Spend Monitor showing:

• Cost by plugin — every plugin and theme that makes AI calls, with call counts, token totals, and estimated cost for each. Attribution is automatic; the plugins being measured don’t need to do anything, and plugins released next year are covered the day they’re installed.
• A 30-day daily spend chart — a runaway loop is visible the day it starts, not three weeks later on an invoice.
• A recent calls log — provider, model, tokens, and cost, call by call.
• A spend notification — set a monthly dollar amount and get one email when estimated sitewide spend passes it.
• CSV export — every recorded call, ready for a client report or your accountant.

One claim worth being precise about, because we tested it against a live provider: the token counts are exact — they match WordPress core’s own AI request log line for line. The only estimated component is the price per token, which comes from published list prices and errs high for cached or discounted traffic. The dashboard will never tell you things are cheaper than they are.

And a privacy point we consider non-negotiable: everything stays in your database, in one small table. The plugin makes zero outbound requests — no telemetry, no account, no license check — and prompt content is never stored. It’s 17 files of readable GPL PHP.

The 60-second test

Not sure whether your AI plugins even use WordPress’s shared key? That’s half the reason to install it. Trigger each of your AI features once and open the dashboard: covered plugins appear immediately with their cost. A plugin that never appears is calling providers directly with its own key — bypassing WordPress, your shared-key setup, and any budget you’ll ever set. Either answer is worth having before the next invoice.

Download AI Spend Monitor free — direct from us today; the WordPress.org directory listing is in review.

When seeing isn’t enough: budgets and a hard stop

The Monitor will tell you, the day it happens, that a plugin is spending too much. It will not stop it — watching and notifying is the free tier’s whole job, and we’d rather say that plainly than have you discover it during an incident.

Stopping is AI Spend Governance: per-plugin and sitewide monthly budgets, alert emails as each budget crosses 50%, 75%, and 100%, and a hard stop that blocks calls before any request leaves your site — which means before your provider charges you anything. We verified that claim call-for-call against a live provider: blocked calls simply never appear in the provider’s log. There’s also a sitewide kill switch for the moment when something is actively going wrong and you want everything paused while you look.

Two design decisions worth knowing if you run client sites: license checks fail open — an outage on our side can never disable your budgets — and if you cancel, the free Monitor, your dashboard, and your full history remain. Nothing is held hostage.

AI Spend Governance is $39 for the first year during Founder Early Beta (renews at the regular $79/yr, shown before checkout, 30-day full refund).

Why we built it this way

The fix for a platform-level gap should sit as close to the platform as possible. Both plugins work entirely through the AI Client’s own documented hooks — the same wp_ai_client_prevent_prompt filter core ships for exactly this purpose. No core patching, no HTTP interception, no fighting WordPress. When core eventually grows its own spend controls, we’ll have spent the intervening years making ours better; until then, this is the meter and the breaker box that WordPress 7.0 forgot to ship.

See which plugin is spending your money — free, or start with the full picture on the product page.