What Does an AI Agent Cost?

Real numbers — from free to premium.

💬 ~50 messages a day
Quick questions, reminders, "what's on my calendar?"
Premium
Claude Sonnet
Anthropic — Best-in-class
Benchmark: 100%
$8
/week
In$3.00/M
Out$15.00/M
✓ Best reasoning & coding · US-based
Smart Pick ⭐
Gemini Flash
Google — Fast & capable
Benchmark: ~92%
$1
/week
In$0.30/M
Out$2.50/M
✓ Has a free tier · Fastest response
Budget
DeepSeek V3
DeepSeek — Dirt cheap
Benchmark: ~80%
$0.33
/week
In$0.28/M
Out$0.42/M
✓ Absurdly cheap · ✗ Chinese servers
Free
Llama 4 Scout
Meta — Open source
Benchmark: ~70%
$0
/week
APIFree (Groq)
Self-host$0
✓ Fully open source · ✗ Needs GPU to self-host
🔀 FYI: All of these models are accessible through one API — OpenRouter. One key, all models, swap anytime.
📊 Performance scores based on Chatbot Arena & LMSys benchmark data (coding, reasoning, instruction following)

5 Ways to Cut Costs

🔀

Route by
Complexity

↓ 60–80%
📦

Compress
Context

↓ 30–50%
🌙

Cheap Model for
Background

~$0.10/day
💾

Prompt
Caching

↓ up to 90%
🛑

Cap Max
Iterations

No runaways
Smart-routed agent — 93% of premium performance
$7–19/wk
Less than Netflix. Runs 24/7.