Cost and operations
BMO has no license fee. Budget for provider usage, configured tool services, execution infrastructure, and operator time. This page helps you budget a pilot without reading every optimization feature first.
Cost model
Section titled “Cost model”| Line item | Who pays |
|---|---|
| BMO binary | No license fee |
| LLM inference | Your provider account (BYOK) |
| Embeddings / search | Configured provider or local embedding service |
| Paid tool services | Your configured service accounts |
| Infrastructure | Your execution environment, storage, networking, and any cloud services |
Published release builds carry the redistribution terms shipped with that release. A catalog with no published downloads is not a grant to copy a binary.
Levers that affect token spend
Section titled “Levers that affect token spend”| Lever | Effect |
|---|---|
| Phase model | Selects models per phase; cost depends on your choices |
| Context pruning | Trims redundant tool results as sessions grow |
| Session compaction | Summarizes history when context pressure rises |
| Prompt caching | Provider-side cache hits when supported |
| Sub-agents / teams | Multiplies parallel inference — use deliberately |
| Arena | Multiplies models per comparison round |
Start with a bounded task and inspect usage before increasing fan-out. Total spend depends on model prices, context size, tool calls, retries, and the number of runs; parallelism alone does not predict the bill.
Headless and CI tradeoffs
Section titled “Headless and CI tradeoffs”Automation uses bmo run, recipes, and bmo service
for unattended work.
| Choice | Cost / risk tradeoff |
|---|---|
| Interactive TUI with approvals | Human review when policy requires a prompt |
bmo run with default gates | Refuses requests needing approval when no approval listener is available |
--auto-approve-tools / -y | Broadens automatic tool permission; review the selected execution boundary |
docker / ssh / buildkit sandbox | Backend-specific execution boundary and operating costs |
For CI patterns, see CI/CD integration.
Operational readiness
Section titled “Operational readiness”| Task | Starting point |
|---|---|
| Verify install | bmo --version, Installation |
| Pin the installed revision | Release tag from Releases |
| Performance diagnosis | Performance |
| Version drift | Versioning — pin release tags when CLI stability matters |
Related
Section titled “Related”- FAQ — API keys and models
- Security and data — data boundaries
- Decision guide — which surface to run