Author(s): Zenefa Rahaman, PhD
Originally published on Towards AI.
Why production agent costs blindside teams — a taxonomy of the hidden line items.
The first production bill for an agent system is almost always a surprise. Not because teams failed to estimate token usage, but because they estimated the wrong thing.
Every team has a version: projected spend looked manageable, the invoice came in at three times the estimate, and prompt tweaks didn’t close the gap. Engineers go looking for inefficient prompts, oversized context windows, redundant calls. They find some — but the optimizations move the bill by ten or fifteen percent. The structural gap is still there.
