Economics
The economics of LLM products. Cost model, control mechanisms, and ROI framework — universal thinking for any LLM agent product.
Tokens as Cost: Core Concepts
Why LLM product economics diverges from traditional SaaS — a token simultaneously constitutes money, latency, and context capacity. Three governing principles plus a reference bill for one task.
Bill Structure Analysis
Decomposition of a $0.19 agent task across five source categories (system prompt, tool descriptions, history, tool results, output), with cost comparison across models.
Controls and ROI
Four-layer cost control mechanism (tier caps, runtime budgets, user visibility, global kill switch) with monitoring criteria; methodology for converting human time into a cost-benefit baseline.