How Much Does AI Actually Cost? The Field Guide to 12 AI Economics Calculators

Developer Michal Piszczek released a suite of 12 free AI economics calculators at piszczek.pl/tools, designed to quantify AI costs, energy use, and agent verification. The tools include a token cost calculator showing a ×177 price spread between models, and an agent-hour calculator that prices fully-loaded agent work at $23.10 per hour, about 38% of a $60 human hour. The calculators are open-source, with a JSON API and an MCP server for AI assistants.

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.