Agent Token Cost Attribution: A Practical Guide for 2026
Agentic coding tasks consume up to 1,000× more tokens than equivalent chat sessions, input tokens (not output) dominate the bill even with prompt caching enabled, and the same task can vary by 30× in total token consumption across runs with no correlation to output quality — yet most teams still have zero per-agent, per-feature cost attribution. Fixing that starts with tagging every LLM request at the SDK call site. Why Token Cost Attribution Matters More in 2026 Than Ever Enterprise GenAI spend hit $37B in 2025, up from $11.5B the year before. 80% of companies exceeded their AI cost forecasts by 25% or more (full breakdown). The old approach — a single API key for the whole team, one line item on the AWS bill — no longer works when agents are running unsupervised loops that burn 25,000–35,000 tokens per turn across 50-turn sessions. ...