Production operations
Cost per task
The full variable cost of completing a defined unit of work.
Definition
Cost per task includes model tokens, search, tools, infrastructure, retries and where relevant human review.
Why it matters
A cheaper model can become more expensive if it requires more retries, supervision or downstream correction.
Related concepts
- Token
A unit of text processed or generated by a language model.
- Operational fitness
Whether a system works reliably within real service constraints.
- Latency
The time taken for a system to produce a result or complete a task.