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The AI Cost Toolkit: Plan and Control LLM Spend

AI features are cheap to prototype and easy to underestimate in production. Every request resends instructions and history, long conversations grow quietly, images get regenerated, and embeddings pile up in storage. The bill follows usage, not users.

These calculators break an AI feature into the parts you pay for. Start with tokens and a single request, scale it to a real feature, then add images, fine-tuning or retrieval if you use them. The LLM prices are checked against official pricing pages and dated on each page.

  1. 1. Tokens and a single request

    Convert words to tokens, price one API call, and check how much of the context window your prompt, history and documents fill.

  2. 2. A feature at real volume

    Scale per-request costs to users and conversations, including the history that gets resent every turn.

  3. 3. Images, tuning and retrieval

    Price usable images after retries, fine-tuning runs and the tuned model's running cost, and the storage and memory a vector database needs.

Questions people ask

What drives LLM costs the most?

Input tokens resent on every request: long system prompts, attached documents and chat history. Output is priced higher per token, but input volume is usually larger. Caching and trimming history are the biggest levers.

How accurate are these estimates?

The arithmetic is exact; the uncertainty is in your inputs. Measure real token counts and conversation lengths from a pilot, then enter those figures for a reliable budget.

How often are the model prices updated?

They're checked against each provider's official pricing page, and the check date is shown on every page that uses them. AI pricing changes often, so confirm before committing to a budget.