My AI agent is burning through API credits
Agents spend 10–100x more than chat use because every loop step re-sends the growing conversation: tool results re-enter context, so the cost per step climbs as the session runs. The tactical fixes are context hygiene and routing routine steps to cheaper models; the structural fix is a flat monthly plan, so a heavy day costs the same as a quiet one.
If you're not sure where the credits go, log tokens per step for one session: the last steps of a long session typically cost several times the first steps purely from accumulated context.
This is the exact problem Standard Compute is built around: a flat monthly price (from $39/mo) instead of a token meter, with smart routing that automatically sends trivial agent steps to budget models and hard ones to frontier models — through one OpenAI-compatible base URL. The bill is the same on your agent's busiest day as on its quietest.
Per-token, heavy daily agent use commonly lands between $50 and several hundred dollars per month depending on model and context size — and it varies week to week. Flat-rate plans put a fixed number on it instead.
For routine steps, yes — file operations, mechanical edits and summaries don't need frontier reasoning. The quality-sensitive steps are a minority; routing only those to a frontier model keeps quality while cutting most of the burn.