An agent that runs around the clock is sold as passive income. It isn't. It's a business that pays you nothing and bills you constantly — in the one currency you can't mint more of: your attention.
We run such agents daily, and here are the three bills nobody itemizes — plus what legally reduces them.
Bill 1 — the context toll
A tool that stays connected to your agent publishes its own definition in every request, whether or not that task uses it. Five servers left on is a toll collected five times per call.
The fix is embarrassingly mechanical: prefer the tool that doesn't live in the context, and turn off what the task doesn't touch. A CLI called on demand costs nothing while idle; a connected server bills per request.
