AI Cost Calculator
Estimate your monthly AI API costs for GPT-4o, Claude Opus, Gemini Pro, and other models. Compare models side by side, calculate team budgets, and estimate self-hosted GPU alternatives.
Monthly Cost
—
Cost per Request —
Annual Cost —
Extended More scenarios, charts & detailed breakdown ▾
Monthly Cost
—
Annual Cost —
Professional Full parameters & maximum detail ▾
%
%
%
$
Input Token Cost
—
Output Token Cost —
Batch Discount Savings —
Caching Savings —
Embedding Cost —
Image/Vision Cost —
Total Monthly (net) —
GPU Self-Hosted Monthly —
How to Use This Calculator
Select your AI model, enter monthly requests and average tokens per request. Results show cost per request, monthly, and annual costs. Use Compare Models to evaluate 3 providers side by side with the same usage. Use Team Budget to calculate costs for an entire development team.
Formula
Monthly Cost = (Avg Tokens ÷ 1,000,000) × Rate per 1M tokens × Monthly Requests
Example
1,000 requests/month × 500 tokens/request using GPT-4o ($5/1M tokens): Cost = (500/1,000,000) × $5 × 1,000 = $2.50/month
Frequently Asked Questions
- Most AI APIs charge per token (roughly 0.75 words). You pay separately for input tokens (your prompt) and output tokens (the response). Rates are usually quoted per 1 million tokens.
- Open-source models like Llama self-hosted on a GPU rental are cheapest ($0.10–0.50/1M tokens). Among commercial APIs, GPT-4o Mini and Gemini Pro are among the most affordable for high volumes.
- Many providers offer 50% discounts for batch requests — where you submit many requests at once and accept results within 24 hours rather than in real-time. Ideal for offline workloads.
- Prompt caching stores the processed version of your system prompt or context. If the same prefix is sent repeatedly, the provider charges at a reduced rate (up to 90% off) for cached tokens.
- An A100 GPU cloud instance runs $3–5/hr. At 500 requests/hr capacity, that is $0.006–0.010 per request. At high volumes (50K+ req/month), self-hosting can be significantly cheaper than commercial APIs.