Calculate & Cut Your AI Token Costs in Real-Time
Stop overpaying on LLM APIs. Simulate monthly workloads across 15+ flagship models, test prompt token counts, and uncover cheaper alternatives.
Interactive AI Token Cost Calculator
Drag the sliders to project daily, monthly, and annual API bills.
Quick Workload Presets
Pick a ready-made scenario or customize your token volume below.
Token & Usage Parameters
By switching or routing background tasks from GPT-4o to Gemini 1.5 Flash, your team saves up to $2,270 annually.
Lowest cost per token, high-frequency tasks, real-time audio/video
State-of-the-art open economics, high-performance general intelligence
High-volume text processing, fast chatbots, classification
Open-weights privacy, self-hosting or ultra-cheap hosted inferencing
Rapid code completion, customer service, structured data extraction
Fast STEM reasoning, competitive programming at lower cost
Massive context (2M tokens), full video/audio analysis, large codebases
Multilingual tasks, European compliance, enterprise code generation
Complex multimodal reasoning, coding, and production apps
Software engineering, nuanced writing, complex agentic workflows
Advanced mathematics, algorithmic coding, PhD-level scientific logic
Live Prompt Tokenizer & Cost Estimator
Paste your system instructions or code to inspect token counts and cost per execution.
Per-Execution Cost Breakdown
Real-time input token execution cost for this exact prompt across top foundational models.
Cheaper & Open-Source AI Alternatives
In-depth comparisons, feature benchmarks, and pricing breakdowns for top tools.
Best Open-Source & Cheaper Alternatives to GPT-4o in 2026
Looking to cut GPT-4o API costs? Compare Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and open-weights Llama 3.3 with pricing and speed benchmarks.
Best Alternatives to Claude 3.5 Sonnet for Coding & Agents
Find the top alternatives to Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Compare OpenAI o1, DeepSeek V3, GPT-4o, and Qwen 2.5 Coder for coding performance and API pricing.
Top Free & Open Source Alternatives to Cursor AI in 2026
Tired of Cursor AI subscription caps? Compare Windsurf, Continue.dev, Void, Cline, and GitHub Copilot with full pricing and feature breakdown.
Best Free & Cheaper Alternatives to ChatGPT Plus ($20/mo)
Looking for ChatGPT Plus alternatives? Discover Claude Pro, Perplexity Pro, Poe, and free open-source web chat UIs that save you $240/year.
Best Free & Local Alternatives to Midjourney in 2026
Find free alternatives to Midjourney. Compare Flux.1, Stable Diffusion 3.5, Ideogram 2.0, and Recraft for photorealism and typography.
Top Open-Source & Cheaper Alternatives to ElevenLabs
Compare the best alternatives to ElevenLabs. Discover Chatterbox, F5-TTS, OpenAI Whisper/TTS, and Coqui TTS for hyper-realistic voice cloning.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Token Economics
Key insights into reducing monthly API spend for developers and startups.
How does AI token pricing work across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google?
APIs charge separately for input tokens (prompts, system instructions, documents) and output tokens (the model's generated response). Output tokens are typically 3x to 5x more expensive per million tokens because text generation requires sequential autoregressive inference on GPU clusters.
What is Prompt Caching and how does it save up to 90%?
Platforms like Anthropic Claude and OpenAI offer prompt caching. If your system prompt, context files, or instructions remain consistent across requests, cached input tokens are processed at a fraction of standard cost (e.g., $0.30/1M on Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs $3.00/1M).
Which LLM provides the highest intelligence per dollar?
As of 2026, models like DeepSeek V3 ($0.14/1M input) and Gemini 1.5 Flash ($0.075/1M input) deliver extraordinary value, outperforming previous generation flagship models at less than 5% of their original cost.