How many AI API requests does $50 a month buy? Budget calculator with live prices

Updated Nov 14, 2026

You have a fixed budget - $20, $50, $500 a month - and want to know how far it goes. The budget calculator turns a monthly budget and a typical request into requests a month and a day for each model, at the cheapest real-time seller of each in today's collection.

How to use it

Budget: USD a month.
Input tokens per request: the prompt, the instructions and any document or chat history you send. A short chat turn is a few hundred tokens; a request with a page of context is 1,000-3,000.
Output tokens per request: the answer. A short reply is 100-300 tokens, a long one 1,000 or more. The table shows the cost of one request, requests a month and a day, and each model's reasoning class, so you can see what you trade for the volume.

Example from today's prices

$50 a month, requests of 2,000 input and 500 output tokens:

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: about 247,000 requests a month (8,200 a day), class A.
Claude Haiku 5.5: about 139,000 a month (4,600 a day).
GLM-5.3: about 69,000 a month (2,300 a day), class A.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: about 34,000 a month (1,100 a day).
Claude Sonnet 5.5: about 6,900 a month (230 a day), class S.
GPT-5.5: about 5,600 a month (185 a day); Claude Opus 5.5: about 3,500 (115 a day).
GPT-6 Astra: about 1,400 a month (46 a day). The same budget goes 100 times further on a small fast model than on a flagship. The numbers use the cheapest seller of each model; the model maker's own price is often higher - open the model's page to see every seller.

Making the budget go further

Shorter prompts: input is usually most of the tokens; trim the instructions and the history you resend.
Prompt caching and batch: a repeated prefix and jobs that can wait cost much less - see the cache and batch calculator.
A mix of models: a cheap model for most requests and a strong one only when needed.
A subscription instead: for one person's daily use a flat plan can be cheaper - subscription or API.

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