AI Agent Costs Explained: Model Routing That Cuts Your Bill
Why agent projects die of API bills and how routing fixes it: the three-tier pattern, the escalation trick, and the costs people forget to meter.
Why agent projects die of API bills and how routing fixes it: the three-tier pattern, the escalation trick, and the costs people forget to meter.
Five agent use cases ordered by mistake-cost, each with the architecture that makes it reliable — research, content ops, triage, reporting, and the pipeline operator.
Pricing models instead of price tables, where each platform genuinely wins, and the switching-cost warning nobody mentions — from an operator running n8n in production.
The listing decisions that separate products that sell from products that sit: naming, covers, skip-if honesty, pricing you can raise, and the features that quietly matter.
The production self-hosting setup we actually run: a small VPS, Docker Compose, Caddy for automatic HTTPS, and the three habits that keep it healthy.
Your exported workflows are sellable products: what actually sells, the packaging that prevents refunds, pricing shapes, and the honesty layer that doubles as a moat.
A 30-day plan engineered against the classic failure: validation before building, a small honest version one, and the buyer list as the real prize.
Five reliability principles from production agents, applied to a concrete first build: a daily research agent with guards, checkpoints, and model routing. No framework required.
Learn n8n from zero: the five core concepts, a genuinely useful first workflow (importable JSON included), and the production habits that separate demos from systems.