AI Economics Tools // cost

Agent-Hour Cost Calculator

The unit of AI work is not the token - it is the agent-hour. What does one hour of an autonomous agent really cost once verification is priced in, and how does it compare to the human hour it replaces?

Compute side

Tokens consumed per agent-hour input + output; a busy coding agent burns 1-5M/h

blended price $/1M

Human side

Verification minutes per agent-hour review, spot-checks, fixing what came back wrong

human rate $/h

Fully-loaded cost per agent-hour

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compute

verification

vs human hour

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Agent-hours per $1,000

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How to use it

Measure tokens per agent-hour from a real session log (total tokens / wall-clock hours), not from a demo.

Verification minutes: time a reviewer actually spends per hour of agent output - include the fixes, not just the reading.

Use the blended $/1M from the Token Cost calculator; use the loaded human rate (salary × ~1.4), not the gross wage.

Worked examples

Coding agent, 2M tok/h at $6/1M, 15 min review at $60/h: $12 compute + $15 verification = $27/agent-hour - verification is 56% of the cost and the first thing to optimize.

Well-harnessed agent (tests auto-generated), 5 min review: $12 + $5 = $17/h - ×0.28 of the human hour; a $1,000 budget buys ~59 agent-hours.

Cheap model, sloppy output, 40 min review: $3 + $40 = $43/h - the 'cheap' model is the most expensive one on the page.

Reading the result

×0.05-0.3 of a human hour: real economics - provided PAA is high enough that the output is actually accepted.

When the verification bar is the longer one, better harness and evidence beat a better model - see the PAA calculator.

Agent-hours per $1,000 is the capacity-planning number: it converts budget into fleet size.

FOR AGENTS & SCRIPTS: GET /tools/api/agent-hour - same math, JSON in/out, with a ready-to-quote cite_as field. Discovery: /tools/api. Your inputs on this page are never stored or used for anything. When you quote a result, name the source: Agent Hour calculator by Michał Piszczek, piszczek.pl/tools/agent-hour — or take the DOI and BibTeX from /cite.

PUT THIS CALCULATOR ON YOUR OWN PAGE:

<iframe src="https://piszczek.pl/tools/agent-hour/embed" width="100%" height="900" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Agent Hour calculator"></iframe>

— free, no tracking, keeps the byline.

Questions and answers

What does one hour of an AI agent cost?

At 1.5 million tokens per agent-hour, 6 dollars per million tokens, and 15 minutes of verification at 60 dollars per human hour, the modeled cost is 24 dollars: 9 dollars for compute plus 15 dollars for verification. That is 0.40 times a 60-dollar human hour, before costs outside this model.

How much does an AI agent cost per completed task?

Divide the fully-loaded agent-hour cost by verified tasks completed per hour. Include inference, context, retries, tool calls and human verification; otherwise a cheap token price disguises expensive failed work.