Every Agent Spend & Pricing comparison and buyer's guide for building AI agents — 4 pieces and counting. Each is a head-to-head or a “best X for Y” roundup with a sources-backed verdict.
The parameter everyone reaches for limits the size of one reply. Agent bills don't blow up on reply size — they blow up on the number of replies. Cap the loop, not the token.
An agent can't enforce its own budget, because the runaway loop is the failure. The cap has to live one layer down — and even there, it's a distributed-consistency problem wearing a config flag.
Gartner says purpose-built agent software more than doubles to $206.5B this year. The same firm says 40%+ of agentic projects get canceled. Both numbers are true, and they're the same story.
Every pricing model for an AI agent is really a decision about who absorbs the inference bill — and the floor under any outcome price is the cost of producing that outcome.
Not buyer's guides — the news, teardowns, and explainers behind this topic.