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What is vibe-budget?

vibe-budget is a CLI tool that estimates the real cost of building AI coding projects before you start spending tokens.

Describe your project in plain English or Spanish — vibe-budget detects the tasks involved, estimates token usage per task, fetches live prices from 85+ models via OpenRouter, and recommends the best model for your budget.

Know the cost before you code.

The problem​

You open Cursor, describe your project, and start vibing.
Three hours later — $47 gone. On a landing page.

Most developers have no idea how many tokens a project actually costs until after the fact. A task that costs $0.01 with Gemini Flash costs $5.80 with Claude Opus. vibe-budget fixes this.

What it does​

  • Detects technical tasks from natural language descriptions
  • Estimates token count per task — input and output separately
  • Fetches real-time prices from OpenRouter across 85+ models
  • Recommends the best model per task based on quality/price ratio
  • Scans existing codebases to estimate refactoring or extension costs
  • Compares cheapest, best value, and premium options side by side

No opinions. No "you should use X". Just the numbers — you decide.

Commands​

CommandDescription
vibe-budget planEstimate costs from a natural language description
vibe-budget scanScan an existing codebase and estimate token costs
vibe-budget pricesList all 85+ models with live pricing
vibe-budget estimateEstimate by predefined project type

Quick example​

vibe-budget plan ecommerce with stripe oauth and supabase
Detected Tasks (4):
1. E-commerce high 130k tokens
2. Stripe Payment high 90k tokens
3. OAuth/OpenID high 60k tokens
4. Supabase Integration medium 67k tokens

Total: 497,000 tokens

[BEST] DeepSeek R1 Quality: 96.1% Cost: $0.99
[REC] DeepSeek V3.2 Quality: 89.6% Cost: $0.72
[CHEAP] Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Quality: 68.0% Cost: $0.07

Supported languages​

vibe-budget detects tasks described in English and Spanish — no need to translate your prompts.

# Both work
vibe-budget plan ecommerce with stripe and supabase
vibe-budget plan ecommerce con stripe y supabase

Models covered​

85+ models from 10+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Mistral, Meta, Qwen, xAI, Zhipu AI, and NVIDIA — all with real-time pricing via OpenRouter.​

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