The Novel Index
One number, asked every night: what's the cheapest price to make an AI write a whole novel? The novel is The Hobbit — 95,356 words. Like the Big Mac Index, it turns abstract token pricing into a single figure you can feel.
The cheapest available price to generate the whole novel, tracked nightly since launch. The floor has held near half a cent — even as the providers behind it keep undercutting each other.
The same 95,356-word novel, generated on each provider's cheapest model. From half a cent to over sixty — a 748× spread for identical output.
Compare providers over time novel cost · last 30 days ▾
The cost to write the whole novel on each provider, tracked nightly — watch them race to the bottom and undercut each other. Tap a provider to add or remove its line.
The Novel Index is the output cost to generate ~95,356 words — the full text of The Hobbit (word count verified via Project Gutenberg). At roughly 0.75 words per token, that's 127,141 output tokens. The index multiplies that by each provider's output price, then takes the lowest across all 22. Because it's output-only and the cheapest of 22, it sits below total-cost headlines for any single provider — like the launch-day "$0.06 to write The Hobbit on Gemini Flash-Lite," which counted input + output on one model.
The benchmark line pins to Google's Gemini Flash-Lite, a fixed, well-known reference point, the way the Big Mac Index uses one standard burger. It moves when Google moves. Grey dots and rows are carried observations: the last known value is retained for that date, not presented as freshly verified.
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⚠ Point-in-time figures, not live quotes. Providers change rates (and run limited promos) often. Always confirm on the relevant provider source linked by the full tool before relying on a number. TokenScale keeps the independent observation history. The Novel Index is the output cost to generate ~95,356 words; The Hobbit is used purely as a fixed, recognisable word count.