Cost Rollup

By Yad Konrad — @0bserver07

Estimated at Opus 4.x public pricing (May 2026): input $15/M, output $75/M, cache_read $1.50/M, cache_write_5m $18.75/M, cache_write_1h $30/M.

Cost composition

pie showData
    title $ share by token pool (total $3,878.59)
    "input" : 3.03
    "output" : 793.63
    "cache_read" : 1596.30
    "cache_write_5m" : 77.02
    "cache_write_1h" : 1408.62

Two pools combine to 77.5% of the bill — cache_read (41%) and cache_write_1h (36%). Output is third at 20.5%. Raw input tokens are negligible because the system/tool prompt was almost always cached.

By pool (orchestrator + 58 workers)

Pool	Tokens	$/M	Cost	Share
input	202,129	$15.00	$3.03	0.1%
output	10,581,714	$75.00	$793.63	20.5%
cache_read	1,064,199,056	$1.50	$1,596.30	41.2%
cache_write_5m	4,107,469	$18.75	$77.02	2.0%
cache_write_1h	46,953,891	$30.00	$1,408.62	36.3%
total	1,126,044,259	—	$3,878.59	100.0%

Cache reads are the bulk of tokens but cheap per-token. Output is the conventional cost driver, but on long orchestration sessions like this one, cache_write_1h can match or exceed it.

By role

Role	Sessions	Tokens (total)	Cost	$/session
orchestrator	1	487,710,910	$1,283.73	$1,283.73
workers	58	638,333,349	$2,594.86	$44.74
total	59	1,126,044,259	$3,878.59	—

Orchestrator carries ~33% of total cost despite being a single session, because it holds the long context (full project + tool list + every dispatch result) and gets recomputed many times.

By wave

Wave	Slug	Workers	Total turns	Cost	$/worker
0	sanity	1	98	$56.18	$56.18
1	search	6	531	$213.94	$35.66
2	local-rules	5	503	$210.31	$42.06
3	rl-hidden-state	5	594	$273.71	$54.74
4	history-fastweights	5	496	$215.84	$43.17
5	predictability	4	382	$159.86	$39.96
6	lstm-1	6	561	$202.65	$33.78
7	lstm-2	5	600	$254.87	$50.97
8	evolutionary	4	572	$257.95	$64.49
9	deep-mlps	4	392	$146.34	$36.59
10	modern	5	642	$286.19	$57.24
11	v1.5	8	868	$317.03	$39.63
—	workers total	58	6239	$2,594.86	—

Wave 11 (v1.5, 8 heavyweight stubs) and wave 10 (modern, 5 stubs) topped the per-wave cost. Wave 3 (RL hidden state) was unexpectedly expensive per worker — partial-observability environments take more turns to get right.

Per-wave cost (bar)

xychart-beta
    title "Worker cost by wave (USD)"
    x-axis "Wave" [W0, W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, W6, W7, W8, W9, W10, W11]
    y-axis "$ cost" 0 --> 380
    bar [56, 214, 210, 274, 216, 160, 203, 255, 258, 146, 286, 317]

Per-worker cost distribution

Min: $20.77 (pole-balance-markov-vac)
Median: $41.05
Mean: $44.74
Max: $122.05 (pipe-6-bit-parity)

Workers built simple stubs in ~$25, complex stubs in ~$90+. The orchestrator is its own outlier at ~$1,283.

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