Vantage Quantifies Agentic Coding Costs: 25:1 Input/Output Token Ratio, $72K/Year for 25-Dev Opus Team vs $7.2K on Standard

Vantage·medium signal

Vantage published a detailed cost analysis of agentic coding sessions showing input tokens dominate at a 25:1 ratio (a 50-turn session consumes ~1M input tokens vs ~40K output). A 25-person team running ~1,000 sessions/month on Opus costs $72K/year vs $7,200 on Composer 2 Standard — a 10x gap. Session length escalates costs non-linearly because every API call re-sends the full accumulated context. Actionable: start fresh sessions after task completion, route background tasks to cheaper models, and set session-length guidelines.