The cost tracking asymmetry is real. You can put $18 next to $0.56 for Perplexity and Manus because they're usage-based.

Claude Cowork is subscription so the math goes fuzzy. I've been trying to estimate my per-task cost for months and the honest answer is I can't, not cleanly. The output quality comparison feels easier to measure than the economics.

Curious whether you noticed differences in how each tool handled long multi-step tasks vs short discrete ones - in my experience the gap between tools widens significantly once a task needs more than 3-4 steps.