📋 What This Tool Does
A quick-start calculator for estimating the return on investment of an AI agent initiative. Input costs (development, API, infrastructure, team time) and projected benefits (time saved, error reduction, throughput gain) to get a simple payback analysis.
Every agent project needs a business case — even a rough one. This calculator helps you build it in 30 minutes instead of 3 days.
💰 Cost Inputs
- Development Cost — Engineering hours, design, prompt engineering, testing
- API & Model Costs — Token consumption, model hosting, inference at scale
- Infrastructure — Compute, storage, orchestration platform, monitoring
- Team Time — Ongoing maintenance, human-in-the-loop, incident response hours
📈 Benefit Projections
- Time Saved — Hours freed per week/month from automated workflows
- Error Reduction — Quality improvement from consistent agent behavior
- Throughput Gain — Volume increase from parallel agent processing
- Simple Payback Period — Months until cumulative benefits exceed total costs
🎯 When to Use It
- Before a hackathon — gut-check whether the agent idea has economic legs
- Sprint kickoff — establish the value hypothesis before writing code
- Budget request — attach numbers to your agent proposal for leadership
- Post-pilot decision — update with actuals to decide whether to scale