Cost & Productivity

Droid gives you two measurement surfaces: OTEL metrics exported to your own observability stack, and the hosted Analytics API. This page is guidance for using them to control spend and to measure what the spend produces.

Cost management strategies

LLM cost control is a combination of model policy, usage patterns, and observability.

Constrain the model catalog

Use org-level policies to limit which models are available.

• Prefer smaller models for everyday tasks; reserve large models for complicated refactors or design work.
• Disable experimental or high-cost models by default.
• Enforce model choices per environment, such as cheaper models in CI.

See Models for the current model catalog.

Tune autonomy and context usage

Higher autonomy and larger context windows consume more tokens.

• Set reasonable defaults for autonomy level and reasoning effort.
• Use hooks to cap context size or block unnecessary large prompts.
• Encourage teams to iterate with tighter scopes, such as specific directories instead of entire monorepos.

Monitor activity and cost

Combine both measurement surfaces:

• Feed exported activity metrics, including tool invocations, code activity, and git activity, into your observability stack to build per-team and per-tool dashboards.
• Use the Analytics API for token consumption and cost estimates, which are not exported as customer OTEL metrics.
• Alert on unusual spikes and compare trends before and after policy changes.

Measuring productivity impact

Cost only matters in the context of outcomes. You can correlate Droid usage with software delivery and quality metrics you already track.

Common approaches:

• Build dashboards from exported activity metrics (files and lines modified, commits, pull requests, tool invocations) per team and repository.
• Pull aggregated adoption and productivity signals from the Analytics API for leadership reporting.
• Measure how often Droid is involved in changes that reduce incidents, resolve alerts, or improve test coverage.
• Use Agent Effectiveness to connect agent spend to cycle-time changes on the issues, projects, and pull requests it touched.

These analyses run entirely in your existing observability and analytics stack; Factory's role is to provide clean, structured signals from Droid.