AI Model Cost Calculator

AI model pricing is split into an input price and an output price per million tokens, and the gap between the cheapest and most expensive models is often 100x or more. This tool multiplies your monthly token volume against every model in our pricing table so you can see the real cost gap for your own workload, not just a generic per-token number.

Estimate Your Monthly Cost

How the Estimate Works

The calculator takes two numbers — your monthly input tokens and monthly output tokens, both in millions — and multiplies each against every model's published per-million-token price. Input and output are priced separately because output almost always costs several times more than input.

• Monthly cost = (input tokens in millions × input price) + (output tokens in millions × output price)
• Every model is ranked from cheapest to most expensive at your specific volume
• Prices come from the same ledger as our full AI model pricing page, sourced from each vendor's official pricing page

From Runs Per Day to Monthly Cost

To price a scheduled job, measure the tokens one run uses, multiply by runs per day, then multiply by 30. That gives you the monthly token volume the calculator above asks for. Most people plan automation in runs per day, so this is the missing step between the two.

Here is a worked example. A small business runs a daily digest job. It reads 20 pages, summarizes what changed, and emails the team a short recap. Swap in your own numbers at each step.

• One run reads 20 pages at about 2,000 tokens each = 40,000 input tokens
• One run writes a recap of about 2,000 output tokens
• Running it 4 times a day = 160,000 input and 8,000 output tokens per day
• Over 30 days = 4,800,000 input and 240,000 output tokens per month
• In the calculator's units, that is 4.8 million input and 0.24 million output

Now price it. Claude Haiku 4.5 lists at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens on Anthropic's pricing page. So input costs 4.8 × $1 = $4.80, output costs 0.24 × $5 = $1.20, and the job runs about $6.00 a month. Raise it to 24 runs a day and the same math lands near $36.00.

For how to set the schedule itself, see our guide on how to run a script on a schedule. Automation bills per token through an API key, not through a seat plan — our guide on an API key versus a subscription covers which one you need.

Why Cost Varies So Much Between Models

The cheapest models on this list, such as Amazon Nova Micro or DeepSeek V4 Flash, cost a small fraction of a cent per million tokens. The most capable flagship models, such as Claude Fable 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol, cost tens of dollars per million tokens because they are built for the hardest reasoning, coding, and research work.

What This Calculator Does Not Cover

This is a token-price estimate, not a full bill. It does not include prompt-caching discounts (several vendors price repeated context far cheaper on a cache hit), per-request fees some vendors add on top of token price, or seat-based subscription plans like ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro, which are priced flat per user rather than per token.

Use the result to compare models against each other for your workload, then confirm the current price and any caching terms on the vendor's official pricing page before you commit spend.