What real AI agent tasks cost
Nobody publishes this. Vendors price agent work in credits, in seats, or in monthly plans, and what one finished piece of work costs is left for you to find out afterwards. Below is every gallery task whose run you can replay — 12 of them — with the amount charged, the engine tier that produced it, and a link to the run itself so the figure is checkable rather than asserted. Five further runs are written up on /examples; they are not in this dataset because no replay link was published for them, and a figure you cannot open is not what this file is for.
The short version
- 12 runs across 6 kinds of work: data, research, slides, travel, website, writing.
- $2.361872 in total — all 12 of them, added up.
- Median run: $0.148155 on the Smart tier, finishing in about 82.5 seconds.
- Cheapest $0.028452, dearest $0.452333 — a spread of about 16× between the smallest and largest job here.
- 2 of the 12 produced no file at all and are included anyway. Dropping them would make the set read as though every task ends in an artifact.
Download it
ai-task-costs.csv ai-task-costs.json
Published under CC BY 4.0 — use it, chart it, quote it,
including commercially, as long as you say where it came from. Suggested citation:
Else, “What real AI agent tasks cost”, 2026-10-02, https://elsedoes.com/ai-task-costs
.
Last regenerated 2026-10-02.
Every run, and what it cost
| Task | Kind | File | Tier | Time | Charged | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How to create a monthly cash flow forecast | data | xlsx | Smart | ~90s | $0.375000 | watch the run |
| How to write a business proposal for a client | writing | docx | Smart | ~60s | $0.131122 | watch the run |
| Dog walking price list template, as a web page | website | html | Smart | ~60s | $0.147935 | watch the run |
| How to make a spreadsheet for receipts | data | xlsx | Smart | ~90s | $0.260554 | watch the run |
| Elementary teacher lesson plan, six weeks | writing | no file | Smart | 15s | $0.028452 | watch the run |
| Four days in Kyoto, planned around dinner | travel | Smart | ~90s | $0.452333 | watch the run | |
| How to create an onboarding plan for a new hire | slides | pptx | Smart | ~60s | $0.130120 | watch the run |
| How to write a quote for a plumbing job | writing | md | Smart | ~60s | $0.148375 | watch the run |
| How to make a good pitch deck | slides | pptx | Smart | ~90s | $0.203537 | watch the run |
| A scam-text sheet to print and stick by the kettle | writing | Smart | ~75s | $0.138613 | watch the run | |
| Invoice template for bookkeeping services | data | xlsx | Smart | ~90s | $0.209215 | watch the run |
| Three ways out of a shared support inbox | research | no file | Smart | ~90s | $0.136616 | watch the run |
What this dataset cannot tell you
- 12 runs is a small number. It is every replayable gallery run, not a sample of anything, and not every run on the site. Treat it as a set of worked examples with real prices attached, not as a distribution you can generalise from.
- Every run here is on one tier (Smart). So nothing in it supports a claim about how cost varies with the engine you pick, which is the first question most people would want to ask of it.
- Each receipt carries a single line. The dataset therefore shows what a run cost, not what the run spent that money on.
- There are no dates. The published entries do not record when each run happened, so there is no time series here and no way to see prices move.
- We chose these tasks. They were written to show the product, which is a selection effect, and the honest way to read the spread is with that in mind.
- These are retail prices on one product. They are what a customer was charged. They are not a benchmark of anything else, and they cannot be compared with another vendor's per-task cost, because no other vendor publishes one.
How it was made
Each row is generated directly from the published run entry it describes — the same source
that renders the example pages — so the figure in the table, the figure on the example page and
the figure on the run's own receipt cannot disagree. A row missing its tier, its currency or its
run link fails the build rather than being published without them. The generator is
apps/marketing/scripts/build-receipt-dataset.mjs.
Hand over one job and read your own receipt
Price depends on the tier — Auto, Fast, Smart, or Max.