What automated text or image moderation costs per month.
Cheap rules catch the obvious cases; reserve the paid API for the grey area. That slashes the item count that actually gets billed. For image-heavy pipelines compare the image processing calculators.
The Content Moderation API Cost Calculator estimates your monthly spending on an automated content moderation service. It works from two inputs: the number of items checked per month — posts, comments, images, or messages sent to the API for review — and the price per 1,000 items that your provider charges. The tool multiplies your volume by that per-item rate to produce a projected monthly bill, so the two main cost drivers are how much content you screen and the unit price of your moderation tier. Because pricing is volume-based, your total scales directly with traffic: doubling the items you check roughly doubles the cost.
The practical trade-off to watch is coverage versus cost. Moderating every item gives the strongest protection but grows expensive as your platform scales, while checking only a sample or a subset of content lowers the bill at the risk of missing harmful material. Before committing, model a few volume scenarios and compare providers' per-1,000-item rates, since small differences in the unit price become large sums at high volume. It also helps to plan for growth — estimate costs at the traffic level you expect months ahead, not just today's, so a rising moderation bill does not catch you by surprise.
Per item scanned — a text snippet, an image, or a video frame — usually quoted per 1,000. Text is cheapest, images cost more, and video (scored per frame or per second) is the most expensive.
Pre-filter with cheap heuristics (keyword lists, hashes of known-bad media) and only send uncertain content to the paid API. Sampling low-risk streams instead of scanning every item also cuts volume without much risk.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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