APIs & Agentic AI
Agent cost & context calculator
An agent loop re-sends its whole conversation every turn, so cost grows with the square of turn count. See what your loop actually costs, and what caching changes.
Compare your assumptions
The captured baseline stays fixed while you edit the proposed inputs below. Edit baseline inputs loads it into the working form; capture again to save your changes. Differences are proposed minus baseline, without a better/worse judgement.
- Cost per session (USD)
- Baseline: 1.974
- Proposed: 1.974
- Difference: 0
- Monthly cost (USD)
- Baseline: 29,610
- Proposed: 29,610
- Difference: 0
- Peak context (tokens)
- Baseline: 53,600
- Proposed: 53,600
- Difference: 0
Save inputs locally to resume this tool. Files may contain sensitive entered information; review before sharing. No automatic storage or transmission. Report JSON is an output record, not an input import format.
List prices as published, 4 October 2026. Editable below — check against current pricing before quoting anything. Published pricing
The stable prefix, sent on every single turn. This is what caching is for.
User message plus tool results. Tool results are usually the larger half.
What the model generates, including its thinking.
The agent loop depth. This is the number that changes the arithmetic.
How many times this runs across the business.
Per session
$1.97
347K in · 9.6K out
Per day
$987
500 sessions
Per month
$29,610
30 days at this volume
What you are paying to send
- 3% new content
- 97% re-sent history
Without caching
$29,610
per month
With caching
$11,166
per month · 62% less
Context at the final turn
54K of 1.00M
Critical
97% of input tokens are re-sent conversation history
The API is stateless, so every turn re-sends everything before it. Across 12 turns that is 347K of input for 11K of genuinely new content on turn one. Input cost grows with the square of turn count, not linearly — which is why an agent that is affordable in a three-turn demo is a different product at 12.
Worth knowing
Prompt caching is off
Enabling it would take this session from $1.97 to $0.74 — 62% less. Caching is a prefix match: any byte that changes early invalidates everything after it, so a timestamp or a per-request ID near the top of the system prompt silently disables it and nothing errors.
Prices are list prices as published in 4 October 2026 and are editable above — they will drift, and this page is not a price list. The arithmetic is the durable part: input cost grows with the square of turn count because the API is stateless and every turn re-sends the whole conversation. That is the shape most agent budgets get wrong, at any price.
More in this category
These exist because the underlying problem is real. If the numbers you just put in look uncomfortable, that is usually worth a conversation.
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