One agent is a line item. A swarm is a budget.
Fan out one orchestrator into N sub-agents and the bill multiplies in ways a per-request price never showed you. Pick your models, your fan-out, and your retry rate, and see the cost per run, per day, and per month, priced from Anthropic’s verified list prices. Nothing leaves this page.
These controls start on illustrative values, not a claim about a typical swarm. Measure a few real runs and set your own token averages; your usage dashboard is the ground truth.
The orchestrator reads every sub-agent’s output, so its input side is usually the biggest single context in the run.
Share of sub-agent calls that fail validation and rerun once. Swarms retry more than you think; check your logs.
Estimated cost per run, your mix
1 Claude Opus 4.8 orchestrator + 5 Claude Sonnet 5 sub-agents with 10% retries.
A real line item. Worth a caching pass before it grows teeth.
Your exact run shape, priced end to end on Claude Haiku 4.5: $0.280/run. The same shape on Claude Fable 5.1: $2.80/run. That is a 10x range you control with a config line, before touching a single prompt.
standard API list prices, verified against Anthropic’s pricing docs on 2026-09-04. models we could not verify are excluded, not guessed.
- Estimates only, at uncached list price. Real runs vary per task.
- Prompt caching bills cache reads at a steep discount, a tenth of the input rate on most models and as little as a fortieth on Fable 5.1. Swarms that share a big system prompt cache heavily, so real input cost can land far below this.
- The Batch API is 50% off both directions for work that can wait.
- Token averages are yours to measure. Log a few runs before trusting any calculator, including this one.
An estimate is a guess. Your logs are a bill.
This page prices the run shape you told it about. The runs you actually dispatch drift: contexts grow, retries spike, someone quietly switches a role to a pricier model. Want this tracked automatically, per run and per agent, with budget alerts that fire mid-run? That is exactly what we are building: join the Agent Cost Watch waitlist.
And if your spend is per-seat rather than per-run, our Cursor Auto cost calculator does the same honest math for editor traffic.