Estimate your monthly AI API spending. According to BenchLM.ai pricing data, costs vary by 100x between the cheapest and most expensive models.
LLM API costs add up quickly at scale. A simple chatbot doing 1,000 requests per day with a frontier model can cost $500-$5,000/month depending on the model and average response length. This calculator helps you estimate real costs before committing to a provider.
Costs are calculated as: (input tokens x input price) + (output tokens x output price) per request, multiplied by your daily request volume. Input tokens include your prompt, system message, and any context (like RAG results). Output tokens are the model's response. A typical English word is about 1.3 tokens. Select multiple models below to compare costs side by side.
Monthly requests: 3,000
Monthly tokens: 4,500,000
DeepSeek V3 is the cheapest at $2.46/mo. Switching from Claude Opus 4.6 would save $155.04/mo.
Not sure which model fits your needs? Try our LLM Selector Quiz or view all pricing.
LLM costs = (input tokens × input price) + (output tokens × output price), multiplied by number of requests. Prices are per million tokens. For example, 1000 input tokens at $2.50/M costs $0.0025 per request.
Input tokens include your prompt, system message, and any context you send. Output tokens are the model's response. A typical English word is about 1.3 tokens. A code token may vary.
For high-volume API usage, Gemini 3.0 Flash ($0.15/$0.60 per M tokens) and DeepSeek V3 ($0.27/$1.10) offer the lowest per-token costs. Open-weight models like Llama 4 are free but require self-hosting infrastructure.
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