What Agely costs to build
Agely exists to put money in older people's pockets, so we keep our own money in the open. This page lists every cost of making the product that we know of, including the AI used to write it.
How to read the figures
Every line is one of four kinds. The total adds cash and estimates together, and the two are also shown apart so you can see how much of it is calculated.
The ledger
AI used to write Agely
Most tokens are cache reads: the agent re-reading the same conversation and files on each step, billed at a small fraction of the normal input price. The figures come from a script in the repository that counts tokens only. It reads no prompts or code.
Who we learned this from
- Open Collective gives each open-source project a public budget where every expense is a line anyone can read. Our ledger copies that shape: one line per cost, with what it was for.
- Signal's "Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive" explains what each cost buys instead of only listing totals. That is why every line here carries a sentence of explanation.
- Cal.com's open page is the open-startup habit of publishing numbers at a fixed address and keeping them current.
How this page stays honest
- The page is drawn from one file, costs.json. Every change to it is a public commit, so the history of the ledger is the history of the file.
- A test fails the build if a line has no explanation, if money marked as paid has no receipt reference, or if the AI estimates drift from the usage table.
- A cost we know about but haven't measured is listed as not yet recorded. It is not left out. Where we estimate, the method and its weak points are written on the line.