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Show HN: CostPerPrompt – Live AI API pricing and real-workload cost calculators

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Why This Matters

CostPerPrompt provides real-time AI API pricing and workload calculators, enabling developers and businesses to accurately estimate costs for over 232 models. By accounting for factors like token pricing, caching, and batching, it offers precise cost insights crucial for budgeting AI applications. This transparency helps optimize AI deployment strategies and control expenses in a rapidly evolving industry.

Key Takeaways

Live pricing for 232+ models, refreshed automatically — plus calculators that turn token prices into real answers: what your chatbot, agent, or API workload will cost per month.

How AI API pricing works — the 60-second version

Every major AI provider bills the same way: you pay per token (roughly ¾ of a word), with separate rates for input (what you send) and output (what the model writes back). Output is usually 3–5× more expensive than input. A model listed at $5 / $25 per million tokens costs $5 for every million tokens you send and $25 for every million it generates.

Two discounts change the math dramatically: prompt caching cuts repeated input costs by up to 90% (critical for chatbots that resend conversation history), and batch processing takes ~50% off when you can wait for results. Our calculators account for both — most "how much will this cost" articles don't, which is why their estimates run 2–3× too high or too low.