Per-task cost on agentic workflows is dominated by failure cases, not the happy path. Here's how to size retry budgets, human review, and unit economics before you ship.
LLM inference cost is a non-linear function of token composition, model mix, and cache behavior β and almost no team models it before shipping. Plan it before the invoice arrives.
Mid-tier models handle ~80% of production AI tasks at 25-35% the cost of frontier β and most teams have never benchmarked their workload to find out. Pick by task profile, not by brand.