Tokens per Dollar Calculator

A dollar goes a lot further on cheap models

Thinking in tokens-per-dollar makes model choice obvious: for bulk, non-critical work a small model buys 10–20× the tokens. Compare per-call on the LLM token cost calculator.

Tokens per dollar: the cross-model shopping unit

Inverting price-per-million-tokens into tokens-per-dollar makes model shopping concrete: at $0.15 per million input tokens, a dollar buys 6.7M tokens — roughly 5M words, or fifty novels of context. At $15 per million, the same dollar buys 67k tokens. The 100× spread between frontier and budget models is the entire cost-optimization opportunity in most LLM apps: routing the 80% of easy queries to a cheap model and reserving the expensive one for hard cases cuts blended cost 5–10× with minimal quality loss. Output tokens price 2–5× input on most providers — the ratio matters more than either number for chat-heavy workloads.

How this calculator works

The Tokens per Dollar Calculator works out how much text you can actually process for your money on each language model. You enter a budget, the input price per million tokens, the output price per million tokens, and the output share of your total tokens. Because input and output are usually priced differently, the tool blends the two rates according to that share to find a real cost per token, then divides your budget to show how many input and output tokens each dollar buys. The main drivers are the two per-million prices and the output share, since output tokens are typically the more expensive side of the bill.

This matters because sticker prices per million tokens are hard to compare across models, and a cheaper-looking rate can lose once output-heavy workloads are weighted in. By ranking models on tokens per dollar, the calculator turns abstract pricing into a concrete throughput number you can compare directly. The key trade-off to watch is your output share: summarization leans input-heavy, while generation leans output-heavy, so set the percentage to match your real usage before trusting the ranking.

Frequently asked questions

How many tokens does a dollar buy?

It depends on the model and your input/output mix. $1 buys ~400,000 tokens on a model at $2.50/1M input, but far more on a $0.15/1M model. Output tokens cost several times more than input, so the mix matters.

Why does the input/output mix change it?

Output is usually 3–5× the input price. A dollar stretches further on input-heavy work (summarizing) than output-heavy work (generation).