Cost Tracking
Keeping tabs on how much money and tokens an agent burns, per run and in total.
Think of it like
Watching the meter in a taxi — you want to know the fare is climbing before you arrive, not after.
Example
A dashboard shows that one customer’s agent runs average 40,000 tokens each, flagging the one that spiked to 500,000.
How it actually works
Agents can be shockingly expensive because a single task fans out into many model calls, and a looping agent can 10x its own cost silently. Tracking spend per run, per user, and per tool is how you catch that before the bill does. It also surfaces which steps are worth optimizing — often one wasteful retrieval or an over-stuffed context is most of the cost, and you’d never know without measuring.
For product teams
Agent economics can make or break a feature — you can’t price or optimize what you don’t measure.
For engineers
Attribute token and dollar cost per step, run, and user to catch runaway spend and target optimization.
Related
- Token Budget — The ceiling you set once you know the costs.
- Step Logging — Where per-step costs get recorded.
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