AI Prompt Cost
Calculator

LLM API pricing varies dramatically across providers. As of June 2026, the cheapest text model (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) costs $0.10 per 1M input tokens, while the most expensive (Claude 3 Opus) costs $15.00 — a 150× difference for the same text.

OpenAI's GPT-5.5 leads at $5/$30 per 1M tokens for complex reasoning tasks. For budget-conscious developers, DeepSeek V4 Flash offers strong performance at $0.14/$0.28, and Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash provides production-ready quality at $0.30/$2.50. The table above shows current pricing for all major providers.

LLM providers charge per token, not per word or character. One token is roughly 4 characters of English text, or about ¾ of a word. A typical 1,000-word article uses about 1,300 tokens. Most providers charge separately for input tokens (your prompt) and output tokens (the model's response), with output tokens typically costing 3–6× more than input.

For example, sending a 500-token prompt to GPT-5.4 costs $0.00125 in input fees. If the model generates 1,000 tokens in response, that adds $0.015 in output fees. At 1,000 calls per month, this works out to roughly $16.25/month. Use the calculator above to estimate costs for your actual usage patterns.

Pick your model based on task complexity and budget. For simple tasks (classification, extraction, short answers), start with GPT-5.4 Mini ($0.75/$4.50) or Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10/$0.40). These models handle 90% of production workloads at a fraction of the cost.

For complex reasoning, coding, or professional work, step up to GPT-5.4 ($2.50/$15) or Claude 3.7 Sonnet ($3/$15). Reserve the most expensive models — GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) and Claude Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) — for tasks that genuinely need frontier intelligence. A practical approach: prototype with cheap models, then upgrade only where quality demands it.