Skip to content
Free tool

AI Cost Calculator.

Pick a model, enter your usage, see the bill before you ship. Covers Claude, GPT 5, and Gemini, input, output, and prompt caching all factored in.

Prices reflect public list pricing as of 2026 and are approximations. Always check provider pricing pages before committing to a budget.

Inputs

Daily active users500
People who use your feature each day
Messages per user per day8
Avg API calls each active user triggers
Avg input tokens / message1,500
Including system prompt, RAG chunks, conversation history
Avg output tokens / message400
Length of the model's reply
Prompt cache hit rate (%)60%
System prompts + RAG chunks often cache. 50-80% is realistic.
Estimated monthly cost
$968
with Claude Sonnet 4.6 · 500 DAU
$0.0081
Per message
$1.94
Per user / month
$32.28
Per day
$11,782
Per year

Cost composition (per message)

Input (cached)$0.0012
Input (uncached)$0.0008
Output$0.0060

Same workload across models

3 ways to cut this number in half

  1. Cache aggressively. System prompts + retrieved chunks rarely change. Get cache hit rate to 70%+, saves up to 90% on input cost.
  2. Use a smaller model for routing. Run cheap model first to decide if you need flagship. Most queries don't.
  3. Cap output tokens. Concise prompts → concise answers. Cut output from 400 to 200 tokens often → same quality, half the cost.

Building this and want a second opinion?

Free 30 minute call. We'll audit your prompt, caching strategy, and eval setup, no slides.

Book a free consultation

How this calculator works

Per message cost = (input tokens × input price) + (output tokens × output price). We multiply by your messages per user per day and your DAU to project daily, monthly, and annual spend. If you turn on prompt caching, the cached portion of input tokens gets the provider's cache hit discount applied (typically 10x cheaper).

What this calculator does NOT include

  • Image, audio, or video token costs (those are priced separately by every provider)
  • fine tuning training costs
  • Vector database / embedding costs (~$0.02 per 1M embeddings on most providers)
  • Your hosting bill (typically <5% of inference cost for serverless deployments)

Pricing sources

Numbers approximate public list prices as of 2026. Authoritative sources: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google.