Free AI cost calculator across Claude, GPT-5, Gemini, DeepSeek, and 36 more.
Every AI provider has a pricing page. None of them tell you your bill. Enter your users, calls, tokens, audio minutes, and image count. Get a live projection across 79 models, a recommendation for your scale, and a shareable card.
Provider pricing pages lie by omission.
OpenAI shows you $5 per million tokens. Anthropic shows you $3 per million. Google shows you $1.25. Every page implies a small number, and none of them tell you what your actual monthly bill will be, because none of them know how many users you will have, how many turns per session, or how big your context windows are.
The gap between “$3 per million tokens” and “$4,200 in November” is where most AI startups get surprised. It shows up as a Slack ping from the finance person, a panic switch to a cheaper model, prompt caching added in a hurry, and sometimes a hard price hike passed to end users. It is preventable with two minutes of math up front.
The Cost Comparator turns provider pricing pages into a live model of your bill. Change the slider, watch the bill change. Compare 8 providers at once. See which model wins at 1,000 users and which one wins at 100,000.
Every provider that matters in 2026.
79 models across five categories, updated weekly by an automated verification job. If a provider prices you use is not here, add a custom model in one click.
Answers you will get in two minutes.
These are the specific questions the calculator resolves. Every one of them has cost a founder time or money to answer manually.
- What is the cheapest capable model for my task in 2026 (and how much cheaper is it than my current choice)?
- If I switch from GPT-5 to Claude Sonnet 5, how much does my monthly bill change?
- What is the true cost of adding a “deep research” premium mode that uses Opus 4.8 or DeepSeek Reasoner?
- If I add speech input (Whisper vs Deepgram Nova 3), what does that add per user?
- At what point does the DeepSeek V3 or Gemini Flash-Lite savings justify a fallback route instead of a single-model pipeline?
- What is my worst-case bill if a viral moment 10x my usage overnight?
- If I set a $500 monthly ceiling, which providers will I need to cap first?
Sample matchups the calculator handles.
| Model | Input per 1M | Output per 1M | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $10.00 | $50.00 | Deepest reasoning, research and analysis |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10.00 | $50.00 | OpenAI flagship, escalation tier only |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | Hard reasoning and agentic loops, a third of Opus 4.8 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $4.00 | $20.00 | Premium tier below the flagship |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | Strongest mid-tier for chat and tool use |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | $2.00 | $12.00 | Closest replacement for the retiring o3-mini |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2.00 | $12.00 | Long context, multimodal, Google ecosystem |
| Grok 4.6 | $2.00 | $6.00 | Low output price, doubles above 200k tokens |
| GPT-5 | $1.25 | $10.00 | Reliable workhorse, now priced like a mid-tier |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | Cheapest capable Anthropic option |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 | $3.75 | Fast and cheap, introductory rate ends 31 Dec 2026 |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | $0.66 | $1.98 | Very cheap, halves again off-peak |
| Mistral Large | $0.50 | $1.50 | European hosting, cut four-fold from Large 2 |
| GPT-5 mini | $0.25 | $2.00 | Cheap OpenAI classifier and router |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | $0.20 | $1.20 | Cheapest tier in the GPT-5.6 family |
How to model your bill in five steps.
Five levers that cut most AI bills 30 to 60 percent.
The calculator shows you the price. These levers change the shape of the bill.
- Cache prompts and responses. Anthropic prompt caching, OpenAI cached input, and simple response memoization typically shave 30 to 50 percent off a chatty workload.
- Route by difficulty. A cheap classifier (GPT-4.1 mini, Haiku 4.5, DeepSeek V3) triages, then only hard cases go to Opus 4.8 / Sonnet 5 / GPT-5.
- Set per-user daily caps. Prevents a small number of heavy users from consuming your entire budget.
- Cut token counts with prompt engineering. Removing rehashed system prompts, compressing tool schemas, streaming instead of buffering, and tightening JSON output all reduce spend.
- Batch long-running work. Overnight image generation on Flux Schnell or SDXL is roughly 20x cheaper than daytime interactive generation on Flux Pro.
Also useful.
Building something specific? Start there instead.
Common questions.
Is this AI cost calculator really free?
Yes. Free forever. No credit card at signup, no trial, no premium tier. You can compare all 79 models, use the recommendation engine, and turn on budget alerts without paying anything.
Which AI providers and models are included?
Text: Anthropic (Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5, Fable 5.1), OpenAI (GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol / Terra / Luna, GPT-5 and mini and nano, o3, o3-mini, o4-mini, GPT-4o), Google (Gemini 3.8 / 3.7 / 3.5 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.1 Pro), DeepSeek (V4 Pro, V4 Flash), xAI (Grok 4.6, Grok 4.3), Mistral (Large), Meta (Llama 3.3 70B via Together), Groq (GPT OSS 120B and 20B), Cohere Command R+, Perplexity (Sonar, Sonar Pro, Sonar Reasoning Pro). Text-to-speech: ElevenLabs Multilingual v2 and Turbo v2, OpenAI TTS and TTS HD, Google Cloud TTS Neural2 and Studio, Deepgram Aura, Azure Neural TTS. Speech-to-text: Whisper, Deepgram Nova 2 and Nova 3, AssemblyAI Universal-2, Google Cloud STT, Azure STT. Image: DALL-E 3 and 3 HD, Stable Diffusion 3.5 and SDXL, Flux Pro and Schnell. Video: Runway, Pika, Luma, Kling, and Sora tiers.
How are prices kept up to date?
Two layers. A GitHub Action runs every Monday and checks every price we publish against the provider's own pricing page, opening an issue when one no longer matches; it reports rather than edits, because a scraper that guesses wrong would publish a wrong price with the authority of an automated check. On top of that, a person re-verifies the roster against every provider page monthly. Every change either pass finds is published with its date and source at /cost-comparator/pricing/changes, including our own corrections.
What is the difference between Claude Sonnet 5 and GPT-5 for cost?
Claude Sonnet 5 is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output. GPT-5 is $1.25 and $10. For a 1,000-token in, 500-token out prompt, Sonnet 5 costs about $0.007 and GPT-5 about $0.00625, so GPT-5 is roughly 11 percent cheaper, not more expensive. An earlier version of this page had both figures wrong and said the opposite; the correction is recorded in the price change log.
What is the cheapest capable LLM in 2026?
GPT-5 nano is $0.05 / $0.40 per million tokens, and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is $0.10 / $0.40, though Google now lists the 2.5 line as legacy. Among current models, GPT-5.6 Luna is $0.20 / $1.20 and Mistral Large is $0.50 / $1.50, which is unusually cheap for a model of that tier. DeepSeek V4 Flash is $0.22 / $0.66 off-peak but doubles during peak hours. The right answer depends on your quality bar: the calculator ranks by projected monthly cost given your own usage.
What is the recommendation engine?
The Cost Comparator reads your usage sliders (users per day, calls per user, tokens per call, audio minutes, images per month, seconds of video) and routes based on volume: under 5k calls / month use premium models because cost is a rounding error; 5k to 100k use a mid-tier workhorse plus premium for hard cases plus a cheap fallback; over 100k cost-optimize hard, cache aggressively, use routing.
Can I add a custom model that is not in the roster?
Yes. Click "Add custom model" and enter your own pricing. Useful for your own fine-tunes, private LLMs, or providers not yet supported.
Can I export or share my projection?
Yes. Every projection generates a shareable card (1200x630 PNG) with your min, max, and cheapest option, and a link back to a live view. Great for sharing with a co-founder or dropping into a board update.
How is this different from a spreadsheet?
A spreadsheet is a snapshot. This is live. Prices are drift-checked weekly and re-verified monthly. You add a new provider and every projection updates. You want to compare 8 models at once, you check 8 boxes. You want to see what a 3x traffic spike does to your bill, you drag a slider.
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You can compare all 79 models, use the recommendation engine, and turn on budget alerts without paying anything.
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