LLM token cost guides
Short, practical explainers — then crunch the numbers in the LLM Token Cost Calculator.
LLM bills are made of tokens: the small chunks of text a model reads (input) and writes (output), priced per million with very different rates for each. Getting a budget right means knowing three things — how many tokens your workload really uses, what those tokens cost across providers, and at what volume renting your own GPU server becomes the cheaper option. These guides cover exactly that, with worked examples you can reproduce.
Typical monthly bills at a glance
| Workload | Tokens/month | Budget API (DeepSeek V4 Flash) | Premium API (Claude Fable 5) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby project | 5M | ≈ $0.84 | ≈ $117 |
| Startup feature | 50M | ≈ $8.40 | ≈ $1,170 |
| Production app | 500M | ≈ $84 | ≈ $11,700 |
| Heavy platform | 5B | ≈ $840 | ≈ $117,000 |
Blended prices at a 4:1 input:output ratio, list prices of July 2026, excluding batch and caching discounts. The spread is the whole story: model choice moves an LLM bill by two orders of magnitude before self-hosting even enters the picture.
All guides
How to estimate your monthly LLM token usage
Turn requests per day and words per prompt into a tokens-per-month number you can trust.
OpenAI vs self-hosting cost
The calculator preset for GPT-5.6 against a rented H100 — with the break-even table.
OpenAI API cost calculator
Your monthly bill across the GPT-5.6 and GPT-5.4 tiers, with a per-tier price table.
Claude API cost calculator
Anthropic pricing for Fable 5 through Haiku 4.5 — with the ~30% tokenizer correction.
Gemini API cost calculator
Google's tiers from budget Flash-Lite to Gemini 3.1 Pro, plus caching discounts.
LLM pricing comparison
Input, output and blended 4:1 prices for 16 models — with the caveats providers leave out.
Tokens to Words Converter
How many words is 1,000 tokens? Two-way converter with tables for prompts, docs and code.
RAG cost calculator
Price retrieval pipelines per component: context chunks dominate, and here's by how much.
Prompt caching cost savings
The savings formula, a $900/month worked example, and the caveats that shrink it.
LLM self-hosting break-even guide
When a rented GPU beats paying per token — formula, capacity check, three scenarios.
AI API budget calculator
Founder math: users × requests × tokens, three example budgets and per-user unit economics.
Need numbers, not theory?
Enter your volume and compare APIs against self-hosting in seconds.
Open the LLM Token Cost Calculator