LLM API Cost Calculator
Estimate the monthly and annual costs of running popular Large Language Models based on your expected usage.
What is an AI Token Cost Calculator?
An AI Token Cost Calculator helps developers and AI startup founders estimate their monthly LLM (Large Language Model) API expenses. When building applications on top of models like GPT-4, Claude 3, or Gemini, pricing is calculated per 1 million "tokens" rather than a flat monthly fee. This tool calculates the projected financial overhead of your AI infrastructure.
How are AI API Costs Calculated?
Every time you send a request to an LLM, the model processes Input Tokens (the prompt you sent) and generates Output Tokens (the response). Providers charge different rates for input and output.
- Input Tokens: Usually cheaper. This includes your system prompt, the user's message, and any document context (RAG) you pass to the model.
- Output Tokens: Usually 3x to 5x more expensive than input tokens, as generating text requires significantly more computational power.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a token?A token is a chunk of text. A helpful rule of thumb is that 1 token is approximately 4 characters in English. So, 100 tokens equates to about 75 words.
How can I reduce my API costs?To minimize costs, you can use prompt caching, switch to smaller, faster models (like Claude 3 Haiku or GPT-4o-mini) for simple tasks, and optimize your RAG pipeline so you only send the most relevant chunks of data as context.