Agent Teams Cost About 7x. Know When That Pays.

Agent teams go beyond subagents: one session leads, teammates work in their own context windows and talk to each other directly, and you can address any of them.

They also burn roughly seven times the tokens of a single session, per Anthropic's own published figures. That is not a reason to avoid them: it is the number that tells you what they are for.

They pay on work that's actually parallel. A full-stack feature spanning frontend, backend and tests. Parallel reviewers comparing findings. Competing hypotheses in a debugging session.

For a merely large sequential task, one session with subagents is cheaper and simpler. Big is not the same as parallel.