The Orchestrator

Book 2 · Delegated IntelligenceChapter 6

Cost as a Standing Constraint

Orchestration is never free, and the orchestrator is the one person in the building who sees both the workload and the bill, because the system is theirs. So the cost is theirs to design: set before the system runs and enforced like a permission, not discovered on the invoice afterward. The toolkit survey prices the components — per million tokens, per always-on day, cheap model versus frontier — and the current numbers live at readorchestrator.com/toolkit.

Contents
  1. 15.1 What the work costs
  2. 15.2 Two surprise invoices
  3. 15.3 Assessing workloads
  4. 15.4 Measuring, not estimating
  5. 15.5 A worked month: the four-agent topology, itemized
  6. 15.6 Establishing boundaries
  7. 15.7 The constant pressure