How much do tokens actually cost?
A token is about three quarters of an English word. So "$5 per million input tokens" means roughly 750,000 words in for $5. But nobody buys a million tokens of nothing: you buy finished tasks. This page translates both ways: paste your own text, then see what real tasks billed.
Current calculator rates are dated in the rate-card section. Historical task bills are from July 2026. Anything with a dotted underline shows its arithmetic on hover or focus.
Translate your text into dollars
Type or paste anything. We estimate tokens with the three-quarters-of-a-word rule and price it as input on every rate card listed here. Nothing you type leaves this page.
| Model | $/Mtok in | This text, one send | Sent 1,000 times |
|---|
Pareto, Unbiased’s blended AI model, is sold as prepaid credits and publishes its rates at $0.80 in / $3.20 out per MTok (October 2026); the next section shows historical Pareto bills measured in July 2026, not Pareto 26.10 task costs. Estimates price input only.
This is the quick estimate. The full calculator estimates your workload from: output tokens, batch sizes, caching, and monthly volume across nine models.
Open the LLM cost calculatorHistorical July 2026 task bills
The same dashboard build prompt, run to completion on each model on the same day, billed by each provider's own meter.
| Model | Rate card (in / out) | The task's real bill | Bill relative to the priciest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fable 5 | $10 / $50 | $0.1462 | |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 / $25 | $0.1158 | |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5 / $25 | $0.0724 | |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 / $10 increase cancelled; $2 / $10 standard | $0.0410 | |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 / $5 | $0.0162 |
Pareto 26.10’s preliminary benchmark scores are on the model card. A measured bill for this dashboard task and a composite score have not been published for this release.
This table only lists models we hold real bills for. Kimi K3 is queued for the same metered run QueuedRunningPublished and GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 are rate cards only for now. The current model card publishes four preliminary Pareto 26.10 benchmark scores; this dashboard task has not been metered on that release. Want your own workload priced? The full calculator takes any prompt.
Historical July 2026 monthly extrapolation
Historical July 2026 projection, not a Pareto 26.10 forecast. Each bar multiplies the July measured task bill by tasks per day and 30. Use the current token-rate calculator for budgeting.
Claude Sonnet 5 at this volume: $30.75 a month at unchanged usage. The September 1 increase was cancelled; $2/$10 is now standard. Counterfactual only: $46.13 would have been the monthly bill.
The three multipliers rate cards hide
Output-rate exhibit
The left number on a rate card is the small one. Output bills at five times input on every card here, so long answers dominate real bills.
Bars are drawn to one shared dollar scale, so you can compare across models as well as within one card.
Verbosity is a price you cannot see on the card
Same task, same rate card. Claude Opus 5 chose to spend about 60% more tokens than Opus 4.8, and its metered bill landed about 60% higher: $0.1158 against $0.0724. Every dot below is one token.
Caching pays you back for re-reading
A real Claude Code session: five API calls, $0.59 total, and 78 times more tokens read than written. Prompt caching made that session 2.6x cheaper than the same calls uncached.
Kimi K3 publishes the cleanest cache line on any card here: $3.00 input, and cache hits bill at a tenth of that.
The toggle also reprices Kimi K3 in the translator above. Cache economics are workload specific: the 2.6x is one real session, the $0.30 is a list price for hits, and your mix of hits and misses decides the rest.
What $10 of credits buys
Same metered dashboard task. $10 divided by each model's real bill, rounded down to whole runs.
Task counts are arithmetic on the July 2026 metered bills above, not a promise about your workload. Longer prompts buy fewer runs; the translator up top shows how fast that scales.
Every rate card on one table
Sortable. The last column translates each input dollar into words, using the three-quarters rule.
| Fable 5 | $10.00 | $50.00 | 5x | ≈ 75,000 words |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 5x | ≈ 150,000 words |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | 5x | ≈ 150,000 words |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00now standard | $10.00increase cancelled | 5x | ≈ 375,000 words |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 | $10.00 | 5x | ≈ 375,000 words |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2.00 | $10.00 | 5x | ≈ 375,000 words |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.10 | $0.50 | 5x | ≈ 7,500,000 words |
| Kimi K3 | $3.00$0.30 cache-hit | $15.00 | 5x | ≈ 250,000 words |
Provider list prices: Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6.1 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna checked October 1, 2026; other models July 2026. Kimi K3 rates are flat across context lengths; its API went live July 16, 2026. Pareto, sold as prepaid credits, publishes its rate card at /pricing/ ($0.80 in / $3.20 out per MTok, October 2026); the bills above are historical Pareto measurements from July 2026, not Pareto 26.10 task costs.
Ten months of price moves
Four dated moves since November, and a fifth that was cancelled. Select a marker for the details.
Why metered pricing is suddenly the whole conversation: weekly usage limits arrived on Claude subscriptions in summer 2025, with 5-hour session windows. On July 7, 2026 the frontier model left subscriptions entirely, moving to API usage credits at $10 in and $50 out. When capacity is metered, translating tokens to dollars stops being trivia.
Quick answers
How many words is a token?
About three quarters of an English word, as a working estimate. A million tokens is roughly 750,000 words. Exact counts vary by tokenizer and language, so meter anything that matters.
Why does output cost more than input?
On every provider rate card on this page, output tokens bill at five times input. Chatty models multiply the premium: Claude Opus 5 spent about 60% more tokens than Claude Opus 4.8 on an identical task at identical rates, and its metered bill was about 60% higher.
What does a real AI task cost in dollars?
Pareto 26.10’s preliminary benchmark scores are on the model card. A measured bill for this dashboard task and a composite score have not been published for this release.
Do token prices change often?
Four dated moves in ten months, and a fifth that was called off: Claude Opus dropped 67% in November 2025, Fable 5 moved to API usage credits on July 7, 2026, Kimi K3 launched at $3 in and $15 out on July 16, 2026, Claude Opus 5 launched at $5 and $25 on July 24, 2026, and Claude Sonnet 5's September 1 increase was cancelled; $2/$10 is now standard.
Four price moves in ten months. The fifth was cancelled.
When any provider changes rates, we re-meter the task and email the new table. That is the whole list.
Pareto selects frontier and open models for each request and blends their outputs into one answer, so you skip this choice entirely.
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