The token bill of one of my clients tripled over the last couple of weeks.
There was nothing broken.
The better these agents get, the more tokens they are eating.
You ask your agent to refactor a function. It looks like a simple request, but behind the scenes, the agent is making a dozen calls:
• Reading files • Pulling relevant context • Planning the changes • Writing the code • Checking any errors • Updating the tests • Retrying anything that failed
Every call costs money. The more autonomous these agents get, the more we'll pay for them.
Multiply that across a few teams, and your bill will blow up.
Worst part of all of this:
It's really hard to know who is spending the money, on which models, and for which tasks.
Nobody sees where all the money is really going.
The solution:
You need a gateway between your agents and the model providers.
You want every request to pass through your gateway first. No exceptions.
A gateway buys you freedom, visibility, observability, flexibility, control, and a bunch of other benefits.
More importantly, it lets you see spending, route cheap work to cheap models, and keep the expensive models for the hard tasks.
I work with @orq_ai. They route to 500+ models across 30+ providers behind a single API.
Check this out: https://router.orq.ai/
Thanks to the @orq_ai team for partnering with me on this post.
