A 20-turn agent run that reads about 59,000 tokens of material gets billed for 656,000 input tokens. Nothing on that invoice is wrong. It's how a stateless model API works, and once you see the shape of it you'll never price an agent job off the rate card again. So let's build one run on paper, price it against a live public price sheet, and see where the money actually goes. Then five ways to cut it, and why I think cost is becoming the skill that separates people who demo agents from peo...