AI Agent Cost Estimator
AI demos are cheap. Production AI is not — the build is only half the cost, monthly token spend is the other half. Founders routinely underestimate inference costs by 10x.
Model your agent below: pick the type (support chatbot, RAG over docs, voice agent), your usage, and the model. You'll get build cost + projected monthly API spend, and where RAG caching cuts it.
Agent type
Model
Monthly active users: 1,000
Messages per user / day: 5
Avg tokens per message: 1,500
Build cost (one-time)
~$18,000
Monthly API spend
~$64/mo
150,000 msgs/mo · RAG caching can cut this 50–70%
Scope my AI agent — freeBuild cost vs inference cost
Build cost is one-time: prompts, evals, RAG ingestion, guardrails, UI. Inference cost recurs monthly: (messages × tokens × model price). GPT-4o-mini is ~15x cheaper than GPT-4o — fine for classification, risky for reasoning.
Where RAG saves money
Retrieval-Augmented Generation grounds answers in your docs, cutting hallucinations and letting you use smaller models. A Pinecone + embeddings pipeline adds ~$3k–$6k to the build but often halves monthly token costs.
When to add a human in the loop
For sales, finance or legal outputs, keep approval steps. Full autonomy is cheaper to run but expensive when wrong. We default high-stakes agents to draft-then-approve.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to build an AI agent?
Simple FAQ chatbot: $5k–$12k. RAG over your docs with evals: $12k–$30k. Voice agent with realtime + tool calls: $20k–$45k. Monthly API spend is separate — see the estimator.
How much does GPT-4o cost per month?
It depends on volume. 10k users × 5 messages/day × ~1.5k tokens at GPT-4o-mini ≈ $150–$400/mo. The same on GPT-4o ≈ $2k–$6k/mo. RAG caching and smaller models cut this 50–70%.
Do I need RAG or is fine-tuning better?
Start with RAG — it's cheaper, updateable without retraining, and cites sources. Fine-tune only for tone/style or classification at scale. 90% of B2B agents never need fine-tuning.
How long to ship a production AI agent?
3–6 weeks: week 1 data + evals, weeks 2–4 pipeline + UI, weeks 5–6 guardrails + load testing. Voice adds 1–2 weeks for latency tuning.
Turn this estimate into a launch plan.
Free 30-min strategy call: we scope your build into fixed-price slices you can approve one by one.
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