About this project

AI cost planning before implementation

AI Token Calculator helps product owners, developers, and operators estimate token usage before they connect a project to an AI API.

Why this calculator exists

Many AI projects begin with a simple idea: summarize documents, answer questions from internal knowledge, review a codebase, or generate daily reports. The hard part is often not the first demo. The hard part is estimating whether the workflow remains affordable after real users, repeated prompts, long outputs, and daily automation are added.

This site focuses on early planning. It converts file size or pasted text into a rough token estimate, then compares input cost, output cost, workflow rounds, and daily usage across common model families. The goal is to help teams make practical decisions before they spend money on production traffic.

What makes the estimate useful

The calculator separates input tokens from output tokens because those two values often have different prices. It also includes safety buffers, output ratios, repeated workflow rounds, and monthly usage. These controls make the estimate more useful than a raw character counter.

The guide pages add context for common use cases such as internal document RAG, PDF summaries, GitHub repository analysis, and API cost reduction. These pages are written to explain the assumptions behind the calculator rather than simply repeat model price tables.

Important limitation

Every result is an estimate. Exact billing depends on the provider, selected model, tokenizer, cached tokens, tools, images, retries, and the usage fields returned by the API. Before making a budget commitment, compare the estimate with the official pricing page for your provider and test a representative sample workload.