The Great Agent Platform Consolidation: Why I'm Rethinking My $9 Side-Project Agent

On Wednesday night I sat staring at two deploy buttons. One was my scrappy LangGraph agent running on a $9/month VPS — duct-taped together with Redis for memory, a homegrown sandbox I'd written three weekends ago, and a credentials file I still felt bad about. The other was Anthropic's new Managed Agents dashboard, asking me for $0.08 per runtime-hour. That's about $58/month if I left it on 24/7. Six times more expensive. I pressed the managed one. Not because I'd gone soft. Because I'd just fin