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TOOL 05 // REALISTIC TCO CALCULATOR

Agent Operational Cost Estimator

Most agent estimates falsely omit human supervisor review and cloud infrastructure. This tool calculates real-world operating expenses: tokens + hosting + supervisor time, using dated API benchmarks.

Volume & Sizing ParametersAPI Pricing As-of: 2026-10-01

Monthly Task Volume (Docs/Tickets/Orders):2,500 tasks

Avg Input Tokens per Task:1500 tokens

Includes system prompts + OCR document text + vendor schema.

Human Supervisor Review Rate (%):10% exception review

Percentage of edge-case tasks routed to a clerk for 1-tap sign-off.

Reviewer Cost ($/hr):

Mins per Review:

Total Monthly Run Cost (Estimate)

$561 / month

Equivalent to ~$0.22 per processed task

LLM Inference API Tokens:$26.25

Cloud Compute & Database Buffer:$35.00

Human Supervisor Review Time:$500.00

Pricing Assumptions & Formula:

* Input Token Rate: $3.00 / 1M tokens; Output Token Rate: $15.00 / 1M tokens.

* Human Review = 250 reviews × (3 min / 60) × $40/hr = $500.

* All outputs labeled estimate. As-of date: 2026-10-01 benchmark.