Skip to content

TUI Health Monitor for AI Agents: Real-Time Cost & Performance Dashboard

image

AI agent developers burn thousands of dollars on LLM costs without realizing it, lacking real-time visibility into token usage, latency, and spending across multiple providers—leading to budget overruns and performance issues.

App Concept

  • A beautiful TUI (Terminal User Interface) dashboard inspired by btop/htop for AI agent monitoring
  • Real-time tracking of token usage, costs, latency, error rates across OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc.
  • Live graphs showing request patterns, token consumption trends, and cost projections
  • Agent-level spend tracking with profit margin calculations for AI SaaS products
  • Alerts for cost spikes, budget limits, and performance anomalies
  • Works locally with integrations for AgentOps, Langfuse, and custom agents

Core Mechanism

  • Lightweight SDK integration: 2 lines of code to start monitoring any AI agent
  • Real-time metrics collection: captures reasoning traces, tool calls, session state, caching
  • Interactive TUI with keyboard shortcuts: navigate between agents, filter by time range, zoom graphs
  • Cost attribution: breaks down spending by model, operation type, and agent task
  • Performance profiling: latency percentiles (p50, p95, p99), error rate tracking
  • Budget enforcement: soft/hard limits with automatic throttling or alerts
  • Trace viewer: inspect individual LLM calls with full request/response details
  • Export capabilities: CSV, JSON, or direct integration with Grafana/Datadog
  • Offline mode: continues monitoring with local SQLite storage when cloud unavailable

Monetization Strategy

  • Free tier: Single agent monitoring, 7-day data retention, basic metrics
  • Pro tier ($19/month): Unlimited agents, 90-day retention, advanced analytics, custom alerts
  • Team tier ($79/month): Shared dashboards, team collaboration, role-based access, Slack/Discord alerts
  • Enterprise tier ($299/month): On-premise deployment, SSO, custom integrations, dedicated support
  • Cloud sync service: Optional paid tier for multi-machine dashboard access
  • White-label licensing: Embed monitoring in your AI product ($499/month)

Viral Growth Angle

  • Shocking cost revelation posts: "Discovered I was spending $847/day on Claude API"
  • Beautiful terminal UI screenshots on Twitter/Reddit (aesthetic appeal)
  • Cost optimization success stories: "Reduced AI costs by 73% using TUI Health Monitor"
  • Integration with popular agent frameworks (CrewAI, AutoGen, LangChain) for automatic discovery
  • Live streaming coding sessions showing the dashboard in action
  • Open-source repository with "awesome-tui" list inclusion
  • Conference demos at AI Engineer Summit, AGI House events

Existing projects

  • AgentOps - Python SDK for AI agent monitoring with dashboard, 2-line integration
  • Langfuse - Open-source LLM observability with latency, cost, and error tracking
  • Coralogix AI Cost Tracking - Real-time AI spending visibility
  • Paid.ai - Real-time agent spend and profit margin tracking
  • Grafana AI Monitoring - Dashboard for agent framework performance
  • Helicone - LLM observability platform (web-based, not TUI)

Evaluation Criteria

  • Emotional Trigger: Limit risk, be prescient (prevent financial disaster, catch problems early)
  • Idea Quality: Rank: 7/10 - Growing need as AI agents proliferate + beautiful UX differentiator
  • Need Category: Stability & Performance Needs (cost management, reliability monitoring)
  • Market Size: 5M+ AI developers/companies using LLMs, estimated $150M+ observability market
  • Build Complexity: Medium-High (requires TUI framework, multi-provider API integration, real-time data visualization)
  • Time to MVP: 5-6 weeks with AI agents (basic TUI + single provider + cost tracking + alerts)
  • Key Differentiator: Only terminal-native AI monitoring tool combining beautiful TUI with comprehensive multi-provider cost and performance tracking