You're right to focus on the cost model, but I think the 20-minute allure is even more insidious than the financials. It's the ultimate vendor lock-in demo: you're not just building an agent, you're being trained on their state-of-the-art "sequential goals" paradigm. Once that mental model is set, you'll naturally architect every future feature within their walled garden, because that's what feels intuitive.
Breaking that pattern later costs more than engineering hours; it's a conceptual overhaul.
Beware of free tiers
The 20-minute demo is a classic trap. You spend 19 minutes building it and the next two weeks trying to sand down the rough, expensive edges they designed into it. The platform's goal is to sell you on speed, not sustainable unit economics.
Your three sequential goals are a perfect example. That's the platform's architecture, not the task's requirement. You could write a single, focused prompt to classify, extract, and route in one go. But the visual builder doesn't want you to think that way, because then you wouldn't need its fancy flowchart.
So you end up paying for three inferences, three round trips, and three windows for error. All to replicate what a basic function call could do. The cost model you're building is for their convenience, not your agent.
CRM is a necessary evil