What a delegation costs
Cost per step, budget caps and credits: how the bill stays visible while the work runs, and why a hidden bill is the fastest way to lose trust.
16 September 2026 · 5 min read · Delagents
A delegation is not free, and we do not think it should look free. Every delegation in Delagents shows an estimate before it starts, the cost of each step as it runs, and the actual total when it finishes. This essay explains what is being counted, how credits and caps work, and why we treat a surprise bill as a defect rather than a revenue line.
The bill is part of the deliverable
When a person hands work to a colleague, the cost is part of the hand-off: how long it will take, what it will need, what it will cost the team. Handing work to an agent should not lower that standard. So on the Progress timeline, each step carries its cost next to its payload, and the delegation's running total updates in the same transaction that records the step. The number you see is never a lagging estimate of a ledger somewhere else. It is the ledger.
What a step costs
Four kinds of thing are metered, and each is written to a usage record at the moment it happens.
| Step | What is metered | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| A model turn | Tokens in and out, with cached input priced lower than fresh input | On the step, and in the run total |
| A tool call with a provider cost | Browsing minutes, enrichment lookups, premium API calls | On the tool step, with the provider named |
| Code execution | Sandbox seconds | On the step |
| Files | Storage for deliverables and attachments | On the delegation |
The mix varies by template. A research memo is mostly model turns and browsing; a support triage run is mostly short turns and reads; a bookkeeping run spends on reconciliation steps and almost nothing on prose. The template pages publish a typical range for each, so the estimate on the composer is not the first time you see a number.
Credits
We price work in credits rather than dollars because the underlying costs are several: tokens from more than one model, minutes of browsing, seconds of sandbox. A credit is a fixed unit of that underlying cost, priced the same on every plan. In practice a simple step, a read or a short turn, costs about one credit, and a long planning turn on the frontier model costs several. The pricing page carries the current numbers: included credits per seat, the price of an extra pack, and the published overage rate.
Credits are common in this category. Lindy and Manus publish credit-based tiers, Zapier bills by activity on its plans, and Relay.app prices per user plus runs or credits, as far as we can read from their pages this month. Where we try to differ is not the unit but the visibility: the credit cost of each step while the run is still going, not a monthly total after the fact. If a product we have not looked at does the same, we would be glad to be corrected.
Caps with hard stops
A cap is the other half of a visible bill. Every delegation carries one, set in the composer with a default from the template. At eighty percent of the cap the agent files a checkpoint so a person can raise the cap or let it finish what it can. At one hundred percent it stops. It never finishes quietly over budget, and it never trades the quality of the deliverable for a lower number without saying so. The microcopy is deliberately plain.
Stopped at the budget cap. Raise it or accept what is here.
Above the delegation sit two more caps. An agent can carry a monthly budget, so a runaway pattern in one template cannot consume the workspace's credits. And the workspace has its own limit: a soft one at eighty percent of included credits, which shows a banner and notifies an admin, and a hard one at one hundred percent plus any purchased balance, at which new delegations are refused and running ones finish their current step and raise a checkpoint. An owner can set that hard limit lower than the plan allows.
Why hidden bills kill trust
A surprise invoice teaches exactly one lesson, and it is not 'write tighter briefs.' It is 'do not connect anything else.' Trust in an agent is trust in its boundaries, and money is the boundary people feel first, before data and before tone. A product that lets an agent run up a bill you did not see is making the same mistake as one that lets an agent send an email you did not read; it has simply chosen a different account to spend from.
This is why we say that runaway cost is a defect, not a revenue line. If a loop burns credits, the fix belongs in the runtime, not in the invoice. The levers we use are ordinary and worth naming.
- Routing: routine steps such as parsing, classifying and writing subject lines run on the cheapest model that passes the template's evaluations; the frontier model is kept for planning and final drafts.
- Caching: the brief, the agent's instructions and the tool definitions are cached across turns, and working memory is summarized rather than replayed.
- Caps: the three levels above, with a hard stop at each.
- Visibility: a per-step cost in view teaches tighter briefs faster than any guide we could write.
- Bring your own keys: Business workspaces can run on their own model keys and pay a platform fee per run instead of credits.
How this shows up on the pricing page
Seats pay for the office: the Inbox, approvals, roles and the audit log. Credits pay for the work. Starter is free and stays free, with a monthly allowance of credits that is enough to run a first delegation from a template and see the bill for yourself. Team and Business include a pool of credits per seat, extra packs are priced on the page, and overage is a published rate rather than a negotiation.
If you ever see a number in Delagents that you did not expect, we want to hear about it, because the number is either the product working or the product failing. There is no third case.
