Agent Cost Modeling

Token math beats price-list math. Model your cost per task, not per call.

A model that costs $3/1M tokens is cheap until your agent burns 80k tokens per task at 5 calls per task with a 0% cache hit rate. The interesting unit is the task, and the interesting equation has six terms, not two.

When to use this skill

• The user is planning a deployment and needs a unit-economics number.
• The user is comparing patterns (ReAct vs. Plan-and-Execute vs. Router) on cost.
• The user is comparing model tiers and only has price-list intuition.
• The user is debugging a cost spike and has no per-task breakdown.

The cost-per-task equation