INTERACTIVE COMPANION · HYPOTHETICAL INPUTS

What does the whole decision path cost?

Change the prices and escalation rate to explore a proposed cascade. The defaults are invented teaching examples. This calculator estimates arithmetic, not model accuracy or production savings.

Your planning assumptions

Prices use dollars per 1,000 requests at the indicated stage.

Original baseline cost per 1,000 incoming requests

Jev-stage cost per 1,000 incoming requests

Fallback cost per 1,000 escalated requests

Use the average on the selected fallback subset.

Additional cascade overhead per 1,000 incoming requests

For example, extra verification, retries or review costs.

Requests sent to fallback 20%

COST PER 1,000 INCOMING REQUESTS

$1.28

68.0% lower cost

First stage, every request
Fallback, selected requests
Additional overhead

Total = first stage + escalation fraction × selected fallback price + overhead

A positive saving is useful only if the complete workflow meets its quality and reliability requirements.

A SEPARATE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

What if every step has to be correct?

This is not a reliability prediction. Assume equal independent per-step correctness, a fixed number of required steps, every error fatal and no recovery.

Hypothetical correctness per step 99%

Required decisions 20

Probability all decisions are correct under those assumptions

81.8%

A confidence score is not a measured per-step correctness rate. Real agents change state, recover, and encounter dependent errors. Measure full-run success, serious failures and recovery cost directly.