Tool

Inference cost

What will the model calls cost once in production?

Requests, tokens, model tier, cache and growth: the monthly bill, its trajectory, and what a lower tier would save.

  • ≈ 3 min
  • Free calculation · AI commentary on request
  • You leave with: The monthly bill and its two-year trajectory

The workload

For a per-user cost. Optional.

System prompt + context + question. A detailed system prompt is 500–2,000 tokens.

A paragraph ≈ 100 tokens. A page ≈ 500.

Model tier

The number one lever. Frontier pricing for routine work is the commonest mistake and the cheapest to fix.

40 %

Share of input context served from the prompt cache. A fixed system prompt plus shared context easily reaches 60%.

8 %
12 months

The bill

Monthly cost (month 1)
€400
€140 — €680
Cumulative over 12 months
€7,600
€2,700 — €13,000
at 8%/month growth — month 12: €939
Cost per request
€0
€0 — €0
Same load on the economy tier
€20
€10 — €70
94% less per month
Same load on the frontier tier
€810
€390 — €2,900
Saving from caching
€70
per month
Cost per active user / month
€10
€0 — €10
Reading

The figures above are computed and free. If you also want them read back to you — what they mean, what is specific to your sector, where to start — that is produced on request.

Month by month

With the growth entered. The line that climbs fast is the one discovered in the third quarter.

Monthly cost — over 12 months995.3732.4469.5206.6-56.3M1M5M9M12
Monthly cost

The detail

Cost line items
LineEstimate
Recurring
Input tokens (uncached)

91M tokens/month × €2.5/M.

€137
€44 — €219
Cached input tokens

40% of context served from cache, at −75%.

€23
€7 — €36
Output tokensoften omitted

24M tokens/month × €10/M. Several times the input price: answer length is a budget line.

€243
€97 — €389

Sensitivity

The bill depends on several assumptions at once. This shows which one to check first if the result feels uncertain.

What moves the result

Each assumption is moved ±20% on its own, holding the others fixed. The longest bar is the one worth checking first — not necessarily the one that felt most uncertain.

Requests per day€6,100 — €9,200
Output tokens€6,700 — €8,600
Monthly growth€7,000 — €8,400
Input tokens€7,000 — €8,200
Cache hit rate€7,400 — €7,900
Around the base case: €7,600

The assumptions

Every figure above rests on these. The ones marked “assumption” have no external source: they are modelling choices, labelled so they can be argued with rather than mistaken for measurements.

Tier
standardPublished
Mid-tier general models.
Output price
10 €/MPublished
Mid-tier output pricing.
Cache discount
−75 %Published
Providers price cached prompt prefixes at a large discount. A stable system prompt plus a long shared context is the common case where this matters.
Input share of the bill
34 %Observed
The rest is output. If this share is small, shortening answers pays more than compressing context.
Price volatility
quarterlyPublished
Published prices fall regularly and model names change. The tiers persist; their occupants rotate. Check the vendor's grid before contracting.

What the calculation does, what the AI does

Every figure on this page comes from a deterministic algorithm running in your browser: the same input always gives the same result, and nothing is sent to produce it. AI runs only afterwards, to write the commentary from those figures. It produces none of them — the format it fills has no numeric fields — and any sentence quoting a value the calculation did not produce is removed before display.

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