One Agent Answer — Every Step Has a Meter

    Azure AI Foundry bills every station separately — the price per answer is a design decision

    Question
    —
    User asks
    →
    Agentic retrieval
    ~$0.000
    50M tokens/mo free
    Σ $0.000
    →
    Semantic ranker
    $0.001
    $1 / 1,000 requests
    Σ $0.001
    →
    GPT-5 input ×1.6
    $0.008
    6,400 tokens (harness)
    Σ $0.009
    →
    GPT-5 output ×1.6
    $0.008
    800 tokens
    Σ $0.017
    Total per answer: ~$0.017 ≈ 2 cents
    ⚠ Bloated prompt + web search + retries → quickly $0.06–0.10