AI cost math without the vendor pitch.
Most AI pricing calculators are embedded in vendor dashboards with an incentive to maximize your spend. This site is the opposite: every formula is open-source, every token price cites the provider's published API pricing page, and every tool is reviewed by a named operator. Built for developers and teams calculating LLM cost, token usage, prompt caching savings, and multi-provider cost comparison.
Calculators
Pick the AI cost math you actually need.
Learn
Concepts behind the AI cost math.
- Token Cost
LLM cost per million tokens explained: input, output, and caching
Input tokens, output tokens, and cached tokens price at different rates — and output tokens are typically 3-5× more expensive. Here's the model-agnostic framework for understanding LLM cost at scale.
- Prompt Caching
Prompt caching ROI by use case: when it pays and when it doesn't
Prompt caching breaks even at ~60% cache hit rate for most workloads. Customer support and RAG retrieval are natural fits; one-off generation rarely justifies the write cost. Here's the use-case breakdown.
- API Costs
LLM API cost guide 2026: what every developer needs to know before they ship
Most developer LLM cost estimates fail three ways: input-only token counting, single-model assumption, linear scaling without caching. Output tokens cost 3-5× more than input tokens. Model choice is your biggest cost lever — 10-15× between budget and frontier for the same task. Here's the framework to fix your estimates before you ship.
- Cost Optimization
Prompt caching complete guide 2026: cut LLM API costs by 50–90%
Prompt caching stores the computed KV attention tensors for your static prefix — system prompt, document context, tool schemas — and charges a dramatically lower 'read' rate on subsequent requests. Anthropic: $0.30/M cache reads vs. $3.00/M standard (90% off). OpenAI: automatic, 50% off. Break-even for Claude Sonnet: 1.39 cache hits per write.
What makes this different
Three things every Bedrocka Tools site does that the vendor dashboard mills don't.
Open-source math
Primary-source citations only
Named operator, no affiliate deal
Bedrocka Tools family
LLM Math Pro is part of the Bedrocka Tools portfolio of source-cited calculator sites. For business finance — SBA loans, cash runway, DSCR, break-even — visit bizmathpro.com (Business Finance Hub). Same doctrine, different depth. Each site is individually source-cited and quarterly reviewed.
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