Workload costs
Nobody knows what two million tokens a day means. So pick the job and how often you run it — the bill comes out per model, as a range, with every assumption visible below. Ranges, not single numbers: the inputs are ranges too, and a decimal here would be a guess in a suit.
| Model | Class | $/day | $/month | Reasoning | Coding | Agentic |
|---|
Straight per-token arithmetic on list prices: no caching, no batching discount, no volume deal. Thinking tokens bill as output, so treat reasoning models as a floor. Weight class is kept because class also tells you something about quality. Capability & cost data: Artificial Analysis
Every number above rests on these. They are rules of thumb, published so you can disagree with them:
- 1 page of A4 text ~ 500-800 tokens
- 1 business email ~ 200-400 tokens; with a quoted thread ~ 800-1,500
- 1 scanned invoice or receipt (OCR text) ~ 400-900 tokens
- 1 support conversation turn ~ 150-300 tokens
- Retrieval-augmented answers add the retrieved chunks: 3-6 chunks ~ 1,500-3,000 tokens
| Task archetype | Tokens in | Tokens out | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Classify & routeRead one short item and pick a label or destination — inbox triage, ticket routing, lead scoring. | 800–1,800 | 120–300 | one email or ticket including a short quoted thread; output is a label plus a one-line reason |
| Extract fields from a documentPull structured data out of an invoice, receipt, order or contract page. | 600–1,600 | 150–400 | one OCR'd page; output is a JSON record of 8-20 fields |
| Draft a replyWrite a customer-ready answer grounded in the incoming message and a short context block. | 1,200–3,000 | 250–600 | incoming message plus tone/policy context; output is a full email |
| Answer from a knowledge baseRetrieval-augmented answer over your own documents — SOP lookup, policy question, product detail. | 2,500–6,000 | 250–700 | question plus 3-6 retrieved chunks; output is a cited answer |
| Summarise something longCondense a meeting transcript, report or thread into a briefing. | 6,000–20,000 | 400–1,200 | a 30-60 minute transcript or a 10-25 page document |
| Write a piece of contentProduce a post, newsletter section or product description from a brief and source material. | 2,000–8,000 | 800–2,500 | brief plus reference material; output is publishable copy |
| Multi-step agent runA goal the model pursues over several tool calls — each step re-reads the growing context. | 15,000–60,000 | 1,500–6,000 | 6-15 tool-calling steps with accumulated context; the dominant cost is re-reading, not writing |
| Scheduled checkA small recurring evaluation — did anything change, does this look wrong, is this worth alerting. | 400–1,200 | 80–250 | one status payload or diff; output is a verdict plus a short reason |
Blueprints that run no model at all (The billable-hours tracker, The lead pipeline that doesn't leak, The client file portal you own, The service-due reminder engine, The downtime alarm, The contract signing station, The 3-2-1 backup strategy, The privacy-first analytics box…) cost hosting, not tokens — they are not in the picker, because a token bill for them would be fiction.