Cost Management

Agent teams are powerful but expensive. A single agent team session can cost $20-80 depending on team size, task complexity, and debate duration. Understanding the cost model prevents sticker shock and helps you design efficient teams. Every agent in a team maintains its own context window — that's a minimum of 10,000-17,000 tokens per agent just for system overhead. A 5-agent team starts at 50,000-85,000 tokens before any work begins. Add inter-agent communication, file reads, and debate rounds, and a single orchestration can easily consume 500,000+ tokens.

The probability compounding problem is the hidden cost of parallelization. If each sub-agent has a 95% success rate on its task, running 10 in parallel gives you 0.95^10 = 59% chance that ALL succeed without errors. At 20 agents, it drops to 36%. This means you should expect some agents to fail and design your orchestration to handle partial results gracefully. The lead should aggregate what succeeded and flag what needs re-running rather than treating any single failure as a total failure.

1. Use Sonnet for Teammates The team lead should run on Opus for synthesis quality. Teammates should run on Sonnet — it's cheaper, has comparable context handling, and is more than sufficient for focused specialist tasks. This alone can cut costs 3-5x.
2. Keep Teams Small 3-5 agents is the sweet spot for most tasks. Beyond 7, coordination overhead starts to outweigh parallelism gains. If you need more coverage, run multiple small teams sequentially rather than one massive team.
3. Set Explicit Shutdown Idle agents continue consuming tokens. Build shutdown into every workflow — after the critic approves output, terminate all background agents immediately. One user left agents running overnight and burned 10-20K unnecessary tokens.
4. Monitor with /cost Run /cost regularly during agent team sessions. If spend is accelerating faster than expected, intervene. It's cheaper to stop and restructure than to let a runaway team drain your budget.
5. Budget Per Session Before starting, decide your token budget. 'This orchestration should cost under $10' gives you a forcing function to right-size the team and limit debate rounds.