Economics & ROI

Build vs Buy vs Orchestrate

Not a cost comparison but a question of which layer is your durable moat: the three-branch decision tree, the hidden costs each path omits, and the lock-in you price today but pay later.

Agent Unit Economics

Cost per token is the wrong unit; cost per successful task is the right one, with the success rate in the denominator where small reliability gains swing margin hardest.

Cost Attribution & Budgets

The provider bill is at the wrong granularity to act on: tag spend by feature, tenant, user, and version, propagate it through fan-out, and make budgets runtime circuit breakers, not reports.

Measuring Agent ROI

Value over a defensible counterfactual, net of the human still in the loop, on a cumulative time-to-value curve — and why the "agent replaces a human" framing is a category error.

Pricing & Packaging Agent Products

Seat, usage, and outcome pricing each misalign somewhere; align price with delivered value but defend the floor, because more autonomy means you hold more variable-cost risk.

Where the Economics Breaks

Unit economics do not erode gradually — they invert at retry storms, the long tail, escalation, the eval bill, and the silent-failure tax; watch the failure surface, not the average.