Base task cost
Don't know your base cost? Use the AI agent cost calculator to get $/task from tokens + model price, then plug it in here.
Pattern parameters
Cost by orchestration pattern
| Pattern | Multiplier | $/task | $/day | $/month |
|---|
Same "agent," five very different bills
Cost calculators for AI agents almost universally price a single agent doing a single task: N steps, M tokens per step, one model. That's the right unit for a simple assistant, but production multi-agent systems in 2026 rarely stop there — five orchestration patterns dominate real deployments, and each one multiplies your base cost in a structurally different way that a single-agent number can't show you.
Fan-out runs N independent copies of the same task in parallel and keeps the best result — cost scales linearly with N, the simplest multiplier. Pipeline chains K specialist stages sequentially, each doing a distinct sub-task — cost scales with stage count. Debate has multiple agents argue over the same problem for one or more rounds before a judge model synthesizes a final answer; reported 2026 production data puts this around 2.5x a single call, which this calculator's defaults (2 debaters, 1 round, judge at half the cost of one agent) reproduce. Supervisor patterns add a coordinating model that reviews and directs a set of worker agents, adding a percentage overhead on top of the workers' combined cost. Swarm patterns are the most expensive per task because coordination overhead compounds with agent count — message-passing and shared-state overhead don't stay flat as you add agents, they grow with the number of agent-to-agent interactions.
The practical use of this calculator isn't picking the "cheapest" pattern in isolation — it's knowing the multiplier before you commit to an architecture. A team budgeting for a single-agent cost and then deploying a debate or swarm pattern in production can see their bill land 2.5x to 12x higher than planned purely from the orchestration choice, with no change to the underlying model or task. Run your real base cost through all five patterns here before you build, not after the first invoice.