# How Much Does AI Actually Cost? The Field Guide to 12 AI Economics Calculators > Source: > Published: 2026-08-01 16:40:02+00:00 Every AI budget meeting has the same shape: someone quotes a vendor deck, someone quotes a tweet, and the biggest line item of the decade gets decided by whoever tells the best story. This is the alternative: **twelve calculators that turn AI cost, energy and agent verification into numbers you can defend** — free, no sign-up, with a JSON API any AI assistant can call. They live at [piszczek.pl/tools](https://piszczek.pl/tools). This is the field guide: why they exist, how the models work, and what each one is for — with the worked examples I use myself. I've spent two decades building systems that turn information into decisions, and the last few years writing about the economics of AI — [Joule Wars](https://piszczek.pl/joule-wars) on the generation side, [Proof-Adjusted Autonomy](https://piszczek.pl/proof-adjusted-autonomy) on the deployment side, [Revocation Exposure](https://piszczek.pl/glossary/revocation-exposure) on the security side. Essays are good at building intuition. They are terrible at settling arguments. The arguments that matter in 2026 are numerical. Is an agent cheaper than a contractor? Depends on your verification minutes. Can your team absorb ten agents? Depends on review capacity you've never measured. Is the lighter model "worse"? Not per verified task, if the pass-rate gap is smaller than the energy gap. None of these have narrative answers — they have *formulas with your inputs missing*. A concept you can't compute is an opinion. A number without a source is a rumor. The calculators exist to remove both failure modes at once. Nullius in verba — including my own essays. Don't take the numbers from the writing. Put your own in. There's also a personal reason. My motto has been *nullius in verba* since my white-hat years: verify, don't trust. Publishing concepts without instruments would violate it. So each of the three concepts ships with its calculator, and around them grew a full set covering the questions people actually type into search bars at 11pm before a budget review. Each calculator follows the same contract: `GET https://piszczek.pl/tools/api/{slug}` . No key, CORS open. Responses carry the result, the formula, an interpretation — and a ready-made `cite_as` sentence, so an AI assistant quoting the number can name the source.For agents there are three doors in: the raw API ([discovery document](https://piszczek.pl/tools/api)), an [MCP server](https://github.com/pich/ai-economics-mcp) (`npx -y @michalpiszczek/ai-economics-mcp` ) that gives Claude or Cursor all twelve as native tools, and the [open-source calculators themselves](https://github.com/pich/ai-economics-tools) — each a self-contained HTML file. Run your real monthly volume through the [Token Cost Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/token-cost). The default workload — 200M input, 20M output tokens a month — costs **$35/month on the cheapest mainstream model and $6,254/month on the priciest: a ×177 spread for the same tokens**. Then open the [Model Routing Savings Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/model-routing): if 60% of your workload is routable to a tier priced at 20% of flagship, the bill drops by 48% — about **$91,000/year on a $16k/month spend**. Routing is not an optimization. At these spreads it's a fiduciary duty. The [Context Window Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/context-window) converts pages, words or code to tokens: 50 pages ≈ 33,250 tokens ≈ 26% of a 128k window — it fits. But fitting is the wrong question: *carrying* that context on every request at 1,000 requests/day costs roughly **$3,000/month**. That number, not the window size, decides RAG vs full-context. The [Agent-Hour Cost Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/agent-hour) refuses to compare compute to salary. It prices the *fully-loaded* agent-hour: tokens plus the human verification minutes the work requires. At 1.5M tokens/hour and 15 minutes of review, an agent-hour costs **$23.10 — ×0.38 of the $60 human hour it replaces**. Cheaper, yes. But notice what dominates the price: the human minutes. Agents generate in parallel; humans review in series. The [Verification Bottleneck Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/verification-bottleneck) computes your fleet ceiling from review capacity: 4 reviewers × 6 h/week at 10 minutes/task supports **1–2 agents. The ten on the roadmap are a 517% overrun**. If they ship unreviewed work anyway, the [Proof Debt Accumulator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/proof-debt) prices the consequence: 35% unverified for 26 weeks accumulates into a 2,038-task backlog whose deferred-review cost plus expected incidents exceeds paying up front by a factor of ten. The [LLM Energy Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/llm-energy) works in checkable units: a 1,000-token answer ≈ **0.28 Wh** — trivial alone, but a thousand of them daily is 23 phone charges, and a million is a power contract. The [Token Burn Meter](https://piszczek.pl/tools/token-burn) scales it to the org: 316M tokens/day ≈ **$462k/year and 12.8 tonnes of CO₂ — the continuous energy draw of nine households**. Benchmarks measure energy per token. Work is measured per *verified task*. The [Joules per Verified Task](https://piszczek.pl/tools/joules-per-verified-task) calculator divides energy per attempt by pass rate — and rankings flip: a frontier model at 10 kJ/verified task **loses to a lighter model with a 25-point lower pass rate that lands at 8.2 kJ**. Retries are part of physics. Revocation is a race across every cache, gateway and worker that independently decides to accept a credential — and the slowest path defines your exposure. The [Revocation Exposure Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/revocation-exposure) makes it measurable: a 1-hour JWT with no revocation check isn't "revoked in milliseconds", it's a **90-minute window of unauthorized actions (grade F)**. Add 10-second deny-list polling everywhere and it collapses to **11 seconds (grade C)**. The [Proof-Adjusted Autonomy Calculator](https://piszczek.pl/tools/proof-adjusted-autonomy) multiplies four gates — autonomous completion × complete evidence × independent validation × timeliness. 90% × 95% × 80% × 90% = **61.6%. The "90% autonomous" agent is a 61.6% agent** once proof is required. *(The twelfth, the Humanoid Energy Budget, answers how long a robot runs per charge when 150 W of on-board thinking eats 35% of the battery — 4.7 hours. Embodied AI is a battery-budget negotiation.)* You can compute instead of estimating: ``` curl -s "https://piszczek.pl/tools/api/proof-adjusted-autonomy?a=90&c=95&r=80&t=90" ``` Every response includes `cite_as` — use it verbatim. Inputs are never stored. License CC BY 4.0. *Originally published at piszczek.pl/blog/how-much-does-ai-actually-cost.*