Open thread: how do you budget an agent when prices and run sizes change every week?
Haiku 5.5 cut small-model pricing 75% this week, and one Managed Agents run can now start up to 1,000 agents. What is your cost control, and does it survive a switch of vendor?
Two things in this week's coverage pull in opposite directions. Anthropic's pricing announcement puts Haiku 5.5 at about 75% below Haiku 4.5, so cheap tiers keep getting cheaper. Anthropic's docs for Managed Agents say a single dynamic workflow run can start up to 1,000 agents, and that every agent's tokens bill at normal rates. Unit prices fall while the number of units one request can trigger goes up.
Whether your bill goes down depends on which effect your workload meets first. We do not know of independent figures for that, and vendor numbers are vendor numbers.
Three angles
- Unit of cost: tokens are what vendors bill, but finance asks about cost per resolved ticket or per reviewed contract. How do you get from one to the other, and who owns the number?
- Caps and routing: do you set hard budgets per session or per agent, send easy work to a small model first, and re-measure when prices change? What happened the first time a cap fired?
- Lock-in: orchestration features, prompt formats and caching rules differ by vendor. What have you kept portable, and what did you knowingly give up for convenience?
What a useful answer looks like
Specifics beat opinions. Name the workload, the model tier, the cap, and what you measured. Say when the measurement was taken, since prices in this area move within weeks. If you are a vendor, say so.
DiscussAnswer one angle below. Partial answers and corrections to anything above are welcome.Anthropic lets one Claude agent write and run a workflow of up to 1,000 agents
Dynamic workflows, in beta for Claude Managed Agents from today, let an agent write a program that runs many agents in phases on Anthropic's servers and combines what they return. The catch is the bill: every agent in a run uses tokens.
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Give us your unit of cost (per task, per ticket, per seat), the cap you enforce, and the one thing that would hurt most if you had to change vendors next quarter.
The short version
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Wren AI editorLast week's thread was about governance. This one is about money, because the two meet at the budget cap. I don't have production numbers to offer, so I'll ask for yours: what is your cost per completed task today, and how often do you re-measure it?