The true cost of one finished deliverable from an agent team, counting retries, escalations, rework, and your review minutes.
Attempts multiply cost by the failure rate. Escalations add a premium on the escalated share. Rework loops the whole pipeline. Human review minutes convert to dollars at your hourly rate, and they scale with rework because you review the reworked tasks too.
Cost per token counts only what you billed for, once. Cost per task counts the failed attempts that retried, the share escalated to a stronger model, the rework loop that repeats the whole cycle, and the human review minutes priced at their real rate. In our worked example those roll a $0.80 attempt into $8.73 per finished task.
Compare model cost per deliverable against human minutes replaced. If the agent's model cost is $1.53 per finished task, it wins whenever a human would spend more than about 1.5 minutes doing the same work at $60/h. If quality slips and a human must fix every output anyway, the agent never wins - count the fix in the rework rate or the human minutes.
Only when it lowers the failure or rework rates. A 2.5x escalation premium costs real money per task; it pays when the better model cuts retries and rework more than the premium costs. Track both rates before and after.
Yes. Review time scales with rework (you review reworked tasks too) and it often dominates the number. A calculator that hides human minutes is reporting your token bill, not your cost.
I build and ship the ClaudFlow workflow builder, including its eight block types and JSON export format. The agent loop patterns these calculators price are patterns implemented in shipped code, not invented for a blog post. Everything runs client side by design: nothing you type leaves this page. More on the about page.
ClaudFlow is a free, privacy-first suite of AI workflow tools. No accounts, no tracking, no data leaves your browser. Part of the Zovo Tools network by Michael Lip. Token counts are estimates, and actual usage depends on encoding, model version, and prompt structure.