What does it cost to add AI to your product?

Most AI providers charge by the token, with separate prices for the text you send (input) and the text the model writes (output). Output usually costs more.

A worked example

A support chatbot sends about 1,500 input tokens and gets back 500 output tokens per reply. At example rates of $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, one reply costs about $0.012. At 1,000 replies a day, that is about $360 a month.

Ways to keep costs down

• Keep instructions short and reuse them.
• Limit how long answers can be.
• Use a smaller, cheaper model for simple questions.

Not sure how many tokens your prompt uses? Paste it into the AI token counter.