Cost management
What agent work costs: who commits money, what stops a run, and how a number is made defensible afterwards.
This section is for whoever answers for what the fleet spends — a budget holder, or the engineer who signs for it. It covers one task end to end: predicting the cost of work, bounding it, recording what it actually cost, and making that number defensible afterwards.
Before you start, read human gates — spend is committed by a dispatch, and a dispatch is a human act.
Read in this order. Budgeting first: everything else assumes the distinction between a quote and a cap.
| Page | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Budgeting a run: the quote and the cap | Who commits money, what actually stops a run, and how quotes get better over time. Start here. |
| What a ledger row knows | What is recorded for every run, and why a run nobody can price is reported as unknown instead of as zero. |
| The dimensions of cost | Per change, per project, per person, per role, per model — which axes are answered by a command and which need an export. |
| Before a dollar is spent | Capacity checks, usage windows, the refusals that happen before a run spawns, and which ceiling is enforced by whom. |
| One yardstick across many vendors | Why running several backends is a measuring instrument rather than a preference. |
| Matching the model to the task | The ladder of actors, what earns each rung, and why nothing picks a model for you. |
| Cheap by planning: the biggest lever | The largest cost control in agent development, which is not the model price list. |
| Worked examples | The commands, in the order the money moves. |
What this section does not cover
⚠ Cost is the whole of it. Upgrading an installation, backing the record up and restoring it, and the signals that say an installation is healthy are not covered here and are not covered elsewhere on this site — they are named so that nobody plans around a chapter that does not exist. What exists today for the adjacent tasks:
| you need | today |
|---|---|
| moving a fleet to a newer engine | Updating a fleet — the delivery, not a full upgrade runbook |
| where the record lives, and which of its data is the only copy | The databases and what they carry |
| whether an install is the one you shipped | Verifying an install |
⛔ Backup and restore has no page, and this list is not one. Three of the record's four classes of data are the only copy of what they hold; a backup plan for them is yours to design today.
Checking a document before you rely on it
How to have a channel document validated rather than trusted, and the rules worth keeping after you close these pages.
Budgeting a run: the quote and the cap
What a cost estimate is, what a budget is, who decides them and on what basis, what happens when a run reaches the ceiling, and how quotes get better over time.