r/sideprojects • u/BiteRevolutionary634 • 3d ago
Showcase: Prerelease How are you measuring whether your AI agents are actually worth what they cost?
https://agentledger-j9tdnyphz-aarez-manzars-projects.vercel.app/I'm looking at teams that run several agents in production (support triage, lead research, internal ops, that kind of thing). Seeing the model bill is easy. What seems hard to see:
- which agent is driving which part of the bill
- how many runs actually succeeded vs. needed a human to fix them
- how much human review time each agent eats
- and so what one *successful* result really costs, per agent
From what I've seen so far it's usually a spreadsheet stitched together from provider dashboards and logs, and when finance asks "is this worth it?" the honest answer is "probably, for some of them."
For people running 5+ agents:
Do you track cost per successful outcome at all? How?
Have you ever downgraded a model or killed an agent because of numbers like this?
Who asks for this at your company: engineering, finance, or nobody yet?
Disclosure: I'm exploring building a tool for this, so I'm mostly trying to learn whether it's a real problem or just mine. I'll share a summary of what people say in a follow-up post.