Model prices dropped an order of magnitude. Tool prices didn't. The same web search still costs anywhere from $0 to $0.005 per call depending on who answers it, and for search-heavy agents that spread is most of the bill.
These posts put numbers on the problem: rack-rate comparisons, cost observability, retry overhead, and the unit economics of shipping a product where every user action fans out into tool calls.
Inference got an order of magnitude cheaper and everyone noticed. The per-call price of search, scrape, and browse barely moved, and almost nobody did.
Everyone budgets for tokens. Then a teardown shows search at 54% of task cost. The math behind why research agents multiply search spend.
Your invoice knows what you spent by provider and month. It has no idea what one agent run cost. Stamp the cost on the response envelope and the question answers itself.
No replatforming, no procurement cycle. Seven changes you can ship by Friday that attack the parts of an agent bill nobody is looking at.
Five providers, one capability, a price range from free to half a cent. An analysis of what you're actually paying for when your agent searches the web.