Let me be real with you: running AI agents in production is not free, and most cost estimates you see online are BS.
They benchmark on toy examples. I'm running real workloads.
My Monthly Bill
- ▸ Claude API: $47/mo (6 agents, mixed schedules)
- ▸ Compute (VPS): $12/mo (cron runner + logging)
- ▸ Storage: $3/mo (logs, outputs, archives)
- ▸ Monitoring: $0 (self-hosted Uptime Kuma)
- ▸ Total: ~$62/month
Where People Get It Wrong
- 1.They don't account for retries. Agents fail. They retry. That costs tokens.
- 2.They forget about context windows. Long conversations = expensive conversations.
- 3.They ignore egress and storage. All that output has to go somewhere.
How to Optimize
- ▸ Use the smallest model that works for each task
- ▸ Cache aggressively
- ▸ Set hard token limits per run
- ▸ Monitor daily, not monthly
🦞 Build smart, spend less.