AI Prompt Cost Estimator

GPT-4o costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens. The mini version (GPT-4o mini) costs only $0.15 per million input and $0.60 per million output tokens, making it one of the most affordable options for high-volume applications.

DeepSeek V3.2 offers the lowest pricing at $0.28 per million input tokens. For open-source models, Llama 4 via Groq costs only $0.11 per million tokens. Among premium models, Gemini Flash-Lite at $0.10 per million input tokens provides excellent value.

Multiply your input tokens by the input price per million, then multiply output tokens by output price per million. For example: (1000 input tokens × $2.50/1M) + (500 output tokens × $10/1M) = $0.0025 + $0.005 = $0.0075 per request.

Input tokens are the text you send to the AI (prompts, context, instructions). Output tokens are generated by the AI in its response. Output tokens typically cost 2-5x more than input tokens because they require more computation.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3/$15 per million tokens (input/output), while GPT-4o costs $2.50/$10. Claude Opus 4.6 is $5/$25 per million tokens. Claude is generally more expensive but offers larger context windows (1M tokens).

A token is a piece of text that the AI processes. In English, 1 token is roughly 4 characters or 0.75 words. So 1000 tokens ≈ 750 words. Non-English languages often require more tokens per word.

Use prompt caching for repeated prefixes (up to 90% savings), batch requests for non-urgent tasks (50% discount), choose smaller models for simple tasks, optimize prompts to reduce token count, and use off-peak pricing when available.

Yes! Google Gemini offers free tier with 15 RPM and 1000 daily requests. xAI Grok provides $25 free credits. OpenAI and Anthropic offer limited free credits for new accounts. DeepSeek has very low pricing that effectively works as near-free for small usage.

Prompt caching stores frequently used prompt prefixes (like system instructions) so they do not need to be reprocessed. Cache reads cost 90% less than regular input tokens. For example, Claude cache reads cost $0.50 per million tokens vs $5.00 regular.

A typical chatbot with 1000 daily conversations averaging 500 tokens each would cost: $15/month with GPT-4o mini, $75/month with GPT-4o, or $5/month with DeepSeek. Costs vary significantly based on response length and model choice.