AI Article Cost Calculator

Set your article length and workflow, and see exactly what one piece costs across 30 models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI — then what that becomes at 100 articles a month.

Prices verified 2026-08-18 · list rates, USD per million tokens

Your article

Article length

1,500 words

Brief & context length ?

250 words

Drafts per article

Model

Articles per month

Assumptions

Prompt overhead Add 20% to input for system prompt & formatting Iterative revision Each redraft re-sends the previous draft as input Batch API pricing 50% off where the provider offers async batching Prompt caching 50% of input served from cache

Advanced

Tokens per word 1.30 English prose averages ~1.3. Raise it for code, markup or non-Latin scripts.

Freelance rate ($/word)

— — per article

10 articles: —
100 articles: —
Per month: —
Per year: —

Token breakdown per article, all drafts

Input: —; —
Output: —; —
Total: —; —

Versus a freelance writer

Human —

—

This model —

Every model, ranked by cost per article

Cost by article length cheapest models, current settings

Reference: list prices USD per million tokens

Model	Provider	Input	Cached in	Output	Context

How this is calculated

Word counts convert to tokens at 1.3 tokens per word, the usual approximation for English prose. Every draft is one API call that produces a full article, so output tokens are words × 1.3 × drafts. Input tokens are the brief re-sent on each call, plus — with iterative revision on — the previous draft handed back for editing, all multiplied by the prompt-overhead percentage. Those two totals are billed at the model's published input and output rates.

Estimates only. Real usage moves with tokenizer differences between providers, reasoning tokens on thinking models, retries, and tool or search calls. Treat the output as a planning figure and check your provider's dashboard for actual spend.