If you haven’t heard of Byobu you’re missing out. It’s an enhancement to GNU screen that, among many cool features, allows users to define their own plugins and have them displayed in the statusbar along the bottom of the terminal.
The default installation comes with a plugin that displays the approximate Amazon EC2 cost of the running instance. I wanted a plugin that worked for Rackspace servers, so I modified it and implemented the Rackspace Cloudserver pricing model to create byobu-rcs-cost. Documentation is in the README, it’s pretty straightforward to install and use.
Now I can quickly see the estimated cost of each server I’m logged into, pretty cool.
Update: This plugin was merged into the official byobu release as of version 2.73. See the byobu project page for more details.