Agents and token usage

Can someone explain the logic behind token usage and agents? Im using c++ to build a custom study for an application i use. Just deploying an agent takes 47k tokens? Normally its about 3 agents that are deployed, just explorer agents that use sonnet. How can they already take 141k tokens within 1 second? After it was all said and done it took 237k tokens in about 2-3 minutes? Am i doing something wrong here? Is it even worth it to use these agents? Im just trying to better understand going this route.