Cutting Idle Agent Costs by 90% with Agent Substrate

Cost is everything. In just about every agentic conversation, the three things that come up for enterprises implementing AI workloads are: Cost Observability Security and as AI continues to throw everyone for a loop when it comes to cost management (e.g - Uber running out of the yearly token budget in one quarter), the ability to shrink resource (like hardware) usage will be crucial moving forward. In this blog post, you will learn how to cust costs by 90% using Agent Susbtrate in comparison to Agents running in k8s Deployments/Pods. The Cost Comparison Agents need a place to run. The "place to run" needs to be a platform that's easily managed, orchestrated, and has the ability to cluster resources. Resources like CPU, GPU, and memory need to be able to scale and expand. Without this, it's a matter of manually managing servers that Agents are running on and clients to interact with said server. That's why so many organizations choose Kubernetes to run Agentic. When running Agents per Pod, however, that can get costly very quick in terms of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory) and performance (can your cluster scale up and down quickly based on resource needs when it comes to Agents coming up and going down per use?). The tests in this blog post show: Always-on Agents running in k8s. Actors running in Workers via Agent Substrate And the comparison will be 50 always-on Pods in comparison to 50 Actors across 5-7 Workers (Pods). If there are 50 Agents running per Pod and 50 Agents running per Worker with 5-10 Actors per Pod, you can already imagine the hardware resource savings that can be accomplished. Right now, the majority of organizations start off with the "one Agent per Pod" approach as that's the fastest way to show value and get up and running. For the future, however, Agents in Actors via Agent Substrate will be how organizations deploy when they care about efficiency, optimization, and managing cost. Let's dive in from a hands-on perspective. Prerequisites To follow a