API Cost Calculator
Estimate your monthly AI API spend using token counts, call volume, and safety caps.
The problem
API cost isn’t just pricing. It’s pricing multiplied by how your app actually behaves under retries and tool failures.
What to include in the estimate
- Tokens per call (input + output)
- Number of calls per user action
- Retry and fallback behavior
Simple estimator
Total cost is roughly proportional to total billed tokens. If retries happen, both input and output tokens rise.
Example scenario
Workflow: extract → plan → draft → revise (4 calls). If your revise step triggers retries 5% of the time, cost rises even when average tokens look stable.
Next step
Set per-agent budgets and caps so cost spikes get stopped early.