AI Cost Estimator

Estimate your AI coding costs

About

AI Cost Estimator

What is AI Cost Estimator?

AI Cost Estimator is a free online tool that helps developers and teams estimate the raw API token costs of building software projects using AI coding agents. Whether you're using Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, or any other AI-assisted development tool, our calculator gives you a realistic cost projection before you start building.

Why We Built This

AI coding agents are transforming software development. But one thing that catches many developers off guard is the cost. A simple “build me a full-stack app” request can cost anywhere from $2 to $2,000+ in API tokens depending on the model, tooling, and quality requirements.

We built this tool to bring transparency to AI coding costs. By modeling how context windows grow per turn and how different tooling types consume tokens differently, we give developers a data-driven starting point for budgeting their AI-assisted projects.

How It Works

Our 4-step questionnaire captures the key variables that affect AI coding costs:

  1. Project Scope — From micro apps (~500 lines) to enterprise systems (~50,000+ lines).
  2. Architecture Complexity — Features like authentication, databases, payments, and real-time functionality add integration overhead.
  3. Agent Tooling — Different tools have vastly different token consumption patterns, from lightweight web UI copilots to fully autonomous sandbox agents.
  4. Quality Level — Draft-quality zero-shot code vs. production-ready code with tests and error handling.

We then model the per-turn token accumulation — accounting for context window growth as the codebase expands — and calculate costs across 40+ models from 9 providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Zhipu, Moonshot, Alibaba, and MiniMax.

Pricing Data

All pricing is sourced from the OpenRouter API and verified against each provider's official pricing pages. We update pricing data regularly as providers adjust their rates. All prices are in USD per million tokens.

Contact

Have feedback, found an error in our pricing data, or want to suggest a feature? We'd love to hear from you.

Email: tangyiming510@gmail.com