I keep running into the same thing with people building AI agents and AI products: everyone can quote the headline price of a model, but almost nobody can tell you what one full agent run costs them.
The reason is that an agent isn't one call. It's a planning step, a few tool calls, some retries, maybe a summary, sometimes across two or three different models. The cost stacks across steps and usually concentrates in one step you didn't expect. Then a provider changes its rates and the math you did last month is quietly wrong.
Which feeds the harder question: how do you even charge for it? Per seat doesn't fit. Usage, outcome, and credit-based pricing all have tradeoffs, and which one works depends on numbers most builders never actually work out.
So I'm curious how this community handles it: