Inference Cost

Inference cost is the financial cost of running a language model to generate a completion, calculated from the number of input and output tokens multiplied by the model provider's per-token pricing.

In production agent deployments, inference cost is often the dominant operational expense and must be tracked per agent, per task, and per team to enable budget accountability, cost attribution, and optimisation decisions.

Closely related concepts include Token, LLM Gateway, Token Budget, Agent Budget. Each is defined in the Prefactor glossary.