The real cost of running AI agents

Every pricing page in this category shows you the smallest of the three numbers you will actually pay.

The three lines on the real invoice

1. Licence or subscription

The published number. For open-source frameworks it is zero, which is exactly why they appear cheapest and frequently are not.

2. Model API spend

Usually larger than the licence, and the line that behaves badly. It scales with how chatty your system is, not with how much value it produced. A verbose multi-agent conversation and a tight single-agent task can differ by an order of magnitude for identical output.

3. Human time

Always the largest, never on any pricing page. Setup, debugging, prompt tuning, integration maintenance, and the meeting where you work out why it stopped. At any realistic hourly rate this dwarfs the other two in month one and often keeps dwarfing them.

Why token spend surprises people

Three mechanics do most of the damage, and none are obvious when you start:

• Retries. A failed step is not free. Systems that retry aggressively can triple the cost of a task that eventually succeeds.
• Conversation overhead. Agents that negotiate re-send context on every turn. The context is billed every time it is sent, not once.
• Loops. Two agents that cannot agree will keep going. Without a hard stop this runs until something external intervenes — usually the invoice.

A fair way to compare options

Build the comparison on total cost of ownership over twelve months, not the sticker:

• Licence or subscription for the year
• Estimated model spend at your realistic volume — then double it, because first estimates are always low
• Setup hours multiplied by a real hourly rate
• Ongoing maintenance hours per month, multiplied by twelve
• The cost of the thing not getting done during the weeks it is broken

That last line is the one people leave out, and it is often the largest. A framework that takes six weeks to get right has six weeks of unposted content in it.

How we price against that

We fold model costs into the plan price and cap every agent, so lines one and two are a single predictable number and line three is close to zero for you — it is our time, not yours. That is the entire reason a managed service can be worth more per month than a free framework.

The plans are published: $499, $899 or $1,499 a month by how many departments you automate, plus a one-time $750 build. The full framework-versus-service argument is in this guide.

Keep reading

• Every agent platform we get compared to, side by side