How to Optimize AI Agent Costs — Inference, API Calls, and Infrastructure

How to Optimize AI Agent Costs — Inference, API Calls, and Infrastructure Agents are expensive. Every API call costs money. Every inference costs money. Every screenshot costs money. At scale, the bill adds up fast. Your agent workflow might cost $0.02 per execution. That's fine for 100 runs. At 10,000 runs per month, you're paying $200. At 100,000 runs, you're at $2,000. Here's how to cut those costs without sacrificing performance. Where Agent Costs Live 1. Inference (LLM calls) GPT-4: $0.03 per 1K input tokens GPT-3.5: $0.0005 per 1K input tokens Claude 3: $0.003 per 1K input tokens A single agent workflow might make 5-10 LLM calls. Each call costs tokens. At scale, this dominates the budget. 2. API Calls Stripe: $0 (but slow at high volume) AWS API calls: $0.0000002 per call (negligible) Custom API calls: depends on your pricing 3. Infrastructure Browser automation: Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium = CPU-intensive PageBolt API: Pay per screenshot/video Hosting agents: EC2, Lambda, s