Claude Managed Agents — Complete Pricing Reference 2026

You opened this tab because you need a number you can actually use. Not a vibe, not “it depends.” A real pricing breakdown you can put in a spreadsheet, a budget request, or a Slack message to your CTO.

This is that page. Every pricing variable for Claude Managed Agents in one place, verified against Anthropic’s current documentation as of April 2026. Bookmark it. The beta will update; so will this.

The Two Cost Dimensions

Claude Managed Agents bills on exactly two dimensions: tokens and session runtime. Every pricing question you have collapses into one of these two buckets.

Dimension 1: Token Costs

These are identical to standard Claude API pricing. You pay the same rates you’d pay calling the Messages API directly. No Managed Agents markup on tokens. Current rates for the models most commonly used in agent work:

• Claude Sonnet 4.6: ~$3/million input tokens, ~$15/million output tokens
• Claude Opus 4.6: higher rates apply — check platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing for current figures
• Prompt caching: same multipliers as standard API — cache hits dramatically reduce input token costs on long sessions with stable system prompts

The implication: a token-heavy agent with a large system prompt that runs the same context repeatedly benefits significantly from prompt caching, and that benefit carries over unchanged into Managed Agents.

Dimension 2: Session Runtime — $0.08/Session-Hour

This is the Managed Agents-specific charge. You pay $0.08 per hour of active session runtime, metered to the millisecond.

The critical word is active. Runtime only accrues while your session’s status is running. The following do not count toward your bill:

• Time spent waiting for your next message
• Time waiting for a tool confirmation
• Idle time between tasks
• Rescheduling delays
• Terminated session time

This is not how you’d bill a virtual machine. It’s closer to how AWS Lambda bills — you pay for execution, not reservation. An agent that “runs” for 8 hours but spends 6 of those hours waiting on human input has a very different bill than one running continuous autonomous loops.

Optional Tool Costs

Web Search: $10 per 1,000 Searches

If your agent uses web search, each search costs $10/1,000 — that’s $0.01 per search. For most agents, this is negligible. For a research agent running hundreds of searches per session, it becomes a line item worth modeling separately.

Code Execution: Included in Session Runtime

Code execution containers are included in your $0.08/session-hour charge. You’re not separately billed for container hours on top of session runtime. This is explicitly stated in Anthropic’s docs and represents meaningful savings versus provisioning your own compute.

Worked Cost Examples

Example 1: Daily Research Agent

Runs once per day. 30 minutes of active execution. Processes 10 documents, outputs a summary report. Moderate token volume.

• Session runtime: 0.5 hrs × $0.08 = $0.04/day (~$1.20/month)
• Tokens (estimate): 50K input + 5K output with Sonnet 4.6 = ~$0.23/run (~$7/month)
• Total: ~$8–10/month

Example 2: Weekly Batch Content Pipeline

Runs 3x/week. 2-hour active sessions. Processes multiple documents, generates structured outputs.

• Session runtime: 2 hrs × $0.08 × 12 sessions/month = $1.92/month
• Tokens: depends on content volume — typically $10–40/month
• Total: ~$12–42/month

Example 3: Customer Support Agent (Business Hours)

Active during business hours, handling tickets. 8 hours/day active, 5 days/week.

• Session runtime: 8 hrs × $0.08 × 22 days = $14.08/month in runtime
• Tokens: highly variable by ticket volume — the dominant cost driver at scale
• Runtime cost alone: ~$14/month — tokens are likely 5–20x this depending on volume

Example 4: 24/7 Always-On Agent

The maximum theoretical runtime exposure. Continuous operation, no idle time.

• Session runtime: 24 hrs × $0.08 × 30 days = $57.60/month
• In practice, no agent has zero idle time — real cost will be lower
• Token costs at this scale become the dominant factor by a wide margin

Anthropic’s Official Example (from their docs)

A one-hour coding session using Claude Opus 4.6 consuming 50,000 input tokens and 15,000 output tokens: session runtime = $0.08. With prompt caching active and 40,000 of those tokens as cache reads, the token costs drop significantly. The runtime charge stays flat at $0.08 regardless of caching.

What’s Not Billed in Managed Agents

A few things that might seem like costs but aren’t:

• Infrastructure provisioning: Anthropic handles hosting, scaling, and monitoring at no additional charge
• Container hours: Explicitly not separately billed on top of session runtime
• State management and checkpointing: Included in the session runtime charge
• Error recovery and retry logic: Anthropic’s infrastructure problem, not yours

Rate Limits

Managed Agents has specific rate limits separate from standard API limits:

• Create endpoints: 60 requests/minute
• Read endpoints: 600 requests/minute
• Organization-level limits still apply
• For higher limits, contact Anthropic enterprise sales

How to Access Managed Agents Pricing

Managed Agents is available to all Anthropic API accounts in public beta. No separate signup, no premium tier gate. You need the managed-agents-2026-04-01 beta header in your API requests — the Claude SDK adds this automatically.

For high-volume agent applications, Anthropic’s enterprise sales team negotiates custom pricing arrangements. Contact them at [email protected] or through the Claude Console.

The Pricing Signals Worth Noting

Anthropic recently ended Claude subscription access (Pro/Max) for third-party agent frameworks, requiring those users to switch to pay-as-you-go API pricing. This signals a deliberate strategy: consumer subscriptions are for human-paced interactions; agent workloads route through the API. The $0.08/session-hour rate exists in that context — it’s infrastructure pricing for compute that runs beyond human attention spans.

The session-hour model also signals something about Anthropic’s infrastructure cost structure. They’re pricing on active execution time because that’s what actually taxes their systems. Idle sessions don’t cost them much; active agents do. The billing model follows the actual resource consumption pattern.

Frequently Asked Questions

For the full session-hour math worked out by workload type, see: Claude Managed Agents Pricing, Decoded: What a Session-Hour Actually Costs You. For the build-vs-buy infrastructure comparison: Build vs. Buy: The Real Infrastructure Cost. For enterprise deployment patterns: Rakuten Stood Up 5 Enterprise Agents in a Week.