Once tokens cost cents, your agent bill runs on minutes

DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017 resolves a SWE benchmark task for just under 20 cents in tokens. At that price, the bill that matters is wall-clock time: sandboxes, CI runners, concurrency slots and people waiting.

cost per task ≈ token_cost + wall_clock_hours x hourly_rate_of_everything_waiting

Three things change once you price time:

• The host matters as much as the model. Same MIT weights, OpenRouter hosts ranging from 24 to 290 tokens per second, prices barely tracking it.
• Concurrency follows wall clock. At 1,000 tasks an hour, a 7.6 minute task (210 tok/s) needs about 127 slots. The same task at 42 tok/s takes 23.5 minutes and needs about 392.
• Success rate divides everything. 8 minutes at 55% success is roughly even with 12 minutes at 85%. Compare cost per successful task, never per-token price.

Also worth knowing: DeepSeek's direct API is double price in weekday peak windows, and the deepseek-flash alias moves on release day, so pin versions.

The full worked example, the cost script and a Python harness to measure time and cost per task on your own agent traffic: DeepSeek V4.1-Flash-1017: Why Time Per Task Beats Token Price