Back to the wheel

Start simple: what does AI actually cost?

Step 1 of 3

Pick something you'd write

AI companies charge by the word, more or less.
Let's see what real writing actually costs.

💬
A text message
~50 words
✉️
An email
~200 words
📰
A news article
~500 words
📖
The Hobbit
95,356 words
Technically they charge by the token, a chunk of a word, about three quarters of one. 100 words is roughly 133 tokens. That's the only jargon you need today.

Standard list estimate

$0.003
Standard on-demand list-price estimate for one run. Active promotions are shown in Basic and the full calculator.
less than a single sheet of paper
The standard wholesale API list-price estimate for this one job. Current promotions are available in Basic and the full calculator.
✓ Still an email ✉️, just resized
200 words
This slider only resizes the thing you picked. It never switches you onto something else.
reading $0.0003 writing $0.003
Reading (input) is cheap; writing back (output) costs several times more per token. That's the most misunderstood thing about AI pricing.
SmallClaude Haiku 4.5 · $0.003
MidClaude Sonnet 5 · $0.006
FlagshipClaude Fable 5.1 · $0.03
Every company sells three sizes: a small fast model, a balanced middle one, and a flagship. Same job, very different bill. Tap the tabs above.

Same job, other companies

OpenAI$0.0007
DeepSeek$0.0007
Google Gemini$0.001
Anthropic$0.003
Prices for the identical task vary 10 to 50 times between companies, and they change constantly. TokenScale checks all 22 nightly and marks any carried observation; these four are just the famous ones.

Scale it up

100people
×
5a day each
100 people × 5 a day = 500 jobs a day$30.44 / monthabout $1.38 a working day · 22 working days · Anthropic Claude Haiku 4.5
One job's price × people × how often: the number a business actually cares about. Watch it change when you switch tiers above.
Open the full tool: all 22 providers, current promotions and price history

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