AI Cost Calculator 2026

Multiply your monthly requests by the input and output tokens per request, then apply each model's per-million-token rate: cost = (monthly input tokens × input price + monthly output tokens × output price) ÷ 1,000,000. This calculator does it across every major 2026 model at once and adds caching and batch discounts. Output tokens cost 3–6× input almost everywhere, so output length is usually the biggest lever.

For capable models, DeepSeek V4 Flash and xAI Grok 4.1 Fast are the cheapest per token, then Google Gemini Flash tiers. Open-weight models can be self-hosted to remove per-token API cost entirely. With heavy prompt caching, DeepSeek cache hits fall below $0.01 per million input tokens. The cheapest model for YOUR workload depends on your input/output ratio — use the calculator above.

GPT-5.5 is $5.00 per million input tokens and $30.00 per million output tokens at standard rates, with cached input discounted. Batch processing runs at 50% off. For a typical RAG app (6k input, 600 output, 50k requests/month) that is roughly $1,200–$1,700/month before caching.

Substantially. Prompt caching discounts repeated input tokens by roughly 90% at OpenAI and Anthropic, ~90% via cache reads at Google, and up to ~98% on DeepSeek. For agents with large, stable system prompts that repeat on every call, caching alone can cut total spend by more than half — set the caching slider to match how much of your prompt repeats.

Yes, dramatically. DeepSeek V4 is many times cheaper on both input and output than GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus while staying near-flagship on reasoning. For high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads DeepSeek and Gemini Flash are usually the value leaders; for the hardest reasoning, the frontier models (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro) still lead.