How much does an AI agent cost to run per month

Alexander Krastev · 2026-09-22

Most answers to this question are either "it depends" or a sales page. Here is the arithmetic, with the one measured number we have.

What you are actually billed for

An agent's cost is the text it reads plus the text it writes, counted in tokens — roughly ¾ of a word each. Nothing else in a run costs money: the platform, the schedule, the database, the approval step are all just software on a machine you are already paying for.

So the only question is: how much text, how many times a month, on which model.

A real run

On our own installation, a workflow run that reads a document and writes a short report comes to about 8,000 tokens — the instructions, the document, the answer. Priced on a mid-range cloud model, that run costs well under one euro cent. Three runs is the whole sample we have measured, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not a benchmark.

Scale it:

Volume a month	Tokens	On a cheap cloud model	On a top-tier model	On a local model
100 documents	~0.8M	pennies	a few euros	nothing per run
1,000 documents	~8M	a euro or two	tens of euros	nothing per run
10,000 documents	~80M	tens of euros	hundreds	nothing per run

The spread between the cheap and the expensive model is roughly twenty-fold, and it is the only decision that really moves your bill. A local model on your own machine costs nothing per run — you pay for the hardware once and the electricity after that.

What makes a bill larger than expected

Long inputs, repeated. A twenty-page contract sent with every question costs twenty pages every time.
The model doing the easy jobs too. Sorting or filtering does not need a frontier model; AIK lets you choose the model per agent for exactly this reason.
Retries you never see. A step that fails and runs again is billed again — which is why every run here records its own tokens, model and cost, and the Analytics page adds them up.

The honest summary

For a small company automating documents, mail and a few workflows, the model bill is usually the smallest line in the project — smaller than the time spent setting it up, and far smaller than the work it replaces. Anyone who cannot show you the cost of a single run is guessing; ask to see one.

Trying it

You can try AIK for free at aikautomation.com and watch each run's own cost as it happens. To have it on your own computer or server — cloud model, local model, or both — you buy a licence and we install it for you. Get in touch.