Running AI Agents in Production: A Worked Monthly Cost Model

A guide on production AI agent costs argues that model tokens typically dominate the bill at moderate scale, ahead of infrastructure like compute. Its worked example models 300,000 tasks a month with eight model calls each, totaling about $21,919, or $0.073 per task, at list prices. Prompt caching reduced the token bill by about 45 percent, with model routing, fewer calls, and shorter outputs as the next biggest levers. Infrastructure, including sandboxes, orchestration replicas, NAT gateways, and trace storage, came to roughly $799 a month. The author, who publishes on a platform called Control Plane, notes that all inputs are stated so readers can substitute their own figures.