AI agent cost calculator
Token meters tell you what you spent — not what it was worth. Estimate your monthly agent bill and see how cost-per-task accounting changes the picture.
Free and local-first. No longer maintained.
Estimate your monthly agent spend
Inputs
Estimated monthly cost
Token-only bill (no retries)
$26
Total with retries (87 tasks/mo)
$30
Cost per completed task
$0.34
Waste from retries
$4
Illustrative estimates only. The model rates and per-complexity token counts are rough figures drawn from public list prices — not a quote. Verify current pricing with your provider. Actual costs depend on prompts, tool use, context size, and model routing.
Token bills hide what actually drove the cost.
Most AI coding tools report cost in tokens: millions of input tokens, hundreds of thousands of output tokens, multiplied by model rates. Precise, auditable — and almost useless for deciding whether the spend was justified.
Nobody budgets in tokens. You budget in tasks: refactors shipped, bugs fixed, features launched. Without per-task attribution, you cannot tell expensive-and-worth-it from expensive-and-wasted.
Cost per task is how you actually budget.
Use the calculator below to estimate monthly spend from your task volume, complexity, and retry rate. Then compare a token-only view to cost-per-completed-task — the number you would actually use to decide if an agent workflow is working.
Medley is designed to track cost per finished task on every mission — so you see receipts attached to outcomes, not a single aggregate at month end.
Attribute cost to finished work
Medley is designed so each mission step carries a receipt: model used, tokens consumed, cost, and outcome.
Spot retry waste early
See how much spend goes to failed attempts versus completed tasks.
Compare routing strategies
Test cheaper models on mechanical tasks with per-task data — not guesswork from token totals.
Roll up to mission level
Task costs aggregate into mission budgets so you know if a project is on track.
AI agent cost FAQ
- How accurate is this calculator?
- This is an estimate based on typical token usage by task complexity and public model pricing. Actual costs depend on your prompts, tool use, context size, and model routing. Use it for budgeting direction, not exact billing.
- What is cost per task?
- Cost per task is the total agent spend attributed to a single unit of work — a refactor, a test suite, a research step — including retries. It is the number you can compare to the value of the output.
- Does Medley add to my API costs?
- Medley itself is free to use — it uses the models you already have access to in Claude Code. Install the Claude Code plugin. Medley is designed to help you see and control that spend with per-task receipts.
See real cost per task on every mission.
Medley is no longer maintained. Existing installations are not being remotely disabled, but future compatibility is not guaranteed.
Maintenance & uninstall instructions