Hidden cost nobody talks about: agent orchestration overhead

Everyone calculates compute and API costs. Nobody budgets for orchestration.

We spent 340 engineering hours in Q1 just debugging agent handoffs — situations where one agent passes work to another and context gets lost or corrupted.

At our loaded engineering cost, that's roughly $85K in unplanned spend.

If you're planning a multi-agent deployment, budget 25-30% extra for orchestration debugging. It's not in any vendor's pricing page but it's very real.