Free LLM API cost calculator for 2026. Estimate monthly spending across 20+ models including GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 2.0 Flash, and DeepSeek V4. Input your token volume, calls per day, and cache hit rate to get an instant monthly cost breakdown. Compare costs across models side by side.
The LLM Cost Calculator helps you estimate monthly API spending before you commit to a provider. It works with 31 models across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Groq, xAI, Zhipu, and Moonshot. To use it, enter four parameters: input tokens per call (how long your prompts are), output tokens per call (how verbose the responses are), calls per day (your request volume), and cache hit rate (what percentage of your input tokens hit the provider's prompt cache). The calculator multiplies your per-call token usage by daily volume and monthly days (30), applies each model's per-token pricing, and factors in cache discounts where available. For example, at 10,000 input tokens and 2,000 output tokens per call, 1,000 calls per day, with 50% cache hit rate, DeepSeek V4 Flash costs about $13/month while GPT-5.5 runs $1,950/month — a 150x difference for similar text. The results are sorted cheapest first so you can immediately see which model fits your budget. When comparing costs, remember that the cheapest model is not always the best choice. Factor in accuracy requirements, latency constraints, and context window needs. A model that costs 3x more but produces correct output on the first try is cheaper than a budget model that requires 3 retries. Start with conservative token estimates, monitor your first week of actual usage through provider dashboards, then refine your cost projections with real data. All prices come from official provider pages and are verified weekly.
This calculator uses official API pricing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, and Groq. Results reflect per-token billing. Actual costs may vary due to tokenizer differences and network overhead.
Cache hit rate is the percentage of input tokens that match a previously cached prompt. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google offer 90% discounts on cached input tokens (10% of base price). DeepSeek offers up to 98% off. For apps with repeated system prompts, cache hit rates of 50-90% are common.
One token is roughly 4 characters of English text. A 1,000-word email is about 1,300 tokens. A typical chatbot prompt with context is 500-2,000 tokens. Start with conservative estimates and adjust after monitoring your first week of actual usage.
Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite at $0.075/1M input is cheapest. For production quality at low cost, GPT-4o Mini ($0.15/1M) and DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14/1M) offer the best balance of quality and price.
Not yet. Batch API pricing (typically 50% discount) is available from OpenAI and Anthropic for non-urgent workloads. The calculator shows standard real-time API pricing only.
In English, roughly 4 characters equal 1 token. A 1,000-word document is about 1,300 tokens. Code and non-English text tokenize differently — use the token counter on this site for precise counts before plugging numbers into the cost calculator.