Your AI Agent Costs Too Much Because Its Job Is Undefined

Model prices matter, but the largest waste often starts before the first token is billed. Undefined jobs make agents read too much, retain stale context, retry without a new strategy and call expensive models for routine work. The useful metric is not cost per token. It is cost per accepted task. Price the completed job, not the individual token Token prices are useful for procurement. They are a poor measure of whether an agent is economical. Suppose one model costs half as much per million…