What one image costs to analyse — resolution becomes tiles becomes tokens.
Vision billing is really a resolution tax: every 512px tile adds tokens. Resize before upload and the per-image cost drops fast. For creating images rather than reading them, use the image generation cost calculator, and blend input/output rates on the blended LLM price calculator.
Free vision API cost calculator — turn image resolution into input tokens and a real per-image and monthly cost for GPT-4o-style vision models.
Vision models split an image into 512-pixel tiles. GPT-4o-style pricing charges a fixed base (about 85 tokens) plus roughly 170 tokens per tile, then bills those as normal input tokens. A 1024×1024 image is four tiles, so about 765 tokens — the more megapixels, the more tiles and tokens.
Downscale images before sending them — resolution drives tile count, and most tasks do not need full resolution. Use low-detail mode when the model offers it (a flat, cheap token cost), crop to the region that matters, and avoid re-sending the same image across turns of a conversation.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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