Building & Product

How much do AI agents cost to run, and how do I keep the bill under control?

Token prices for equivalent quality fall roughly 10x a year, yet agent bills keep rising because agents burn 50 to 500 times the tokens of a chat: every step re-sends the whole history. A simple task can cost a fraction of a cent while a long agent session runs several dollars. The levers that matter: prompt caching (up to 90% off repeated context), routing easy steps to cheap models, trimming history, and measuring cost per completed task rather than per token.

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18 resources.

More in AI Agents

What actually is an AI agent, in plain language? 18 → Why would a founder use agents instead of a chatbot or automation? 18 → What real tasks are founders delegating to agents today? 20 → How do I build my first agent without being technical? 20 → Which platform or framework should I build my agents on? 18 → How do I test an AI agent and know when it's reliable enough to trust? 18 → What can go wrong when an agent acts on my behalf, and how do I keep it safe? 16 → What is MCP, and why does it matter for my agents? 18 → Should I build one agent or a team of agents working together? 18 → Can coding agents like Claude Code actually build my product? 18 → Is there a real startup opportunity in building vertical AI agents? 19 → How should I price a product built on AI agents? 18 → Why do most AI agent projects fail, and what do the winners do differently? 19 → How do I give my agent the right context and memory so it stops forgetting? 18 →

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The same ground, over in Build the product, our Starting Up track.

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