96% OF YOUR AGENT TRAFFIC COSTS $9.66. THE OTHER 4% COSTS $4,934
the bill almost never comes from the work itself. it comes from asking a frontier model to decide whether work is needed at all, one event at a time, all night long.
event → gate → deterministic / model / human → log → next event
the video above is 2,400,000 events falling through a single decision gate. the gate answers in 0.8 ms at $0.0000042 per call. it sends 96% straight to deterministic handlers, 3.8% to a model, and 0.2% to a person.
→ it filters the events that never needed generated text
→ it scores risk before anything expensive gets touched
→ it picks 1 of 3 exits: deterministic, model or human
→ it writes every verdict down so the run can be replayed later
that split is the entire story. 2,304,000 events cleared for $9.66. the 96,000 that genuinely needed a model or a person cost $4,934.27 between them.
what i keep coming back to is this: the model never got cheaper. it just stopped being the thing that decides when it should run.