{"slug": "show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives", "title": "Show HN: Free API cost calculators – know your bill before it arrives", "summary": "A developer launched a free API cost calculator that estimates monthly spend for LLMs including GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 nano, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3.5 Flash based on token throughput. The tool helps developers and product teams predict their API bills before they arrive, using current 2026 pay-as-you-go pricing.", "body_md": "## LLM Token & API Cost Calculator\n\nEstimate monthly spend across GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 nano, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3.5 Flash based on your token throughput.\n\n**—**\n\n**—**\n\n**—**\n\n**—**\n\n**—**\n\nPricing reflects published 2026 public API rates (USD, pay-as-you-go). Volume discounts, cached input, and batch pricing are not applied. Verify against the provider's pricing page before budgeting.\n\n### LLM Cost Calculator — GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4 Nano & Gemini 3.5 Flash Pricing\n\nThis LLM cost calculator helps developers and product teams estimate their monthly OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google API spend before it hits their credit card. You enter three variables — input tokens per request, output tokens per request, and monthly request volume — and the tool computes your total cost using current June 2026 USD pricing. GPT-5.5 costs $5.00 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens. For budget workloads, GPT-5.4 nano at $0.20/$1.25 per 1M is the most affordable OpenAI option in 2026 — a team running 100,000 requests/month at 1,500 in + 500 out tokens pays around $30/month.\n\n## How much does GPT-5.5 API cost per 1,000 requests?\n\nAt June 2026 pay-as-you-go pricing, GPT-5.5 costs $5.00/1M input tokens and $30/1M output tokens. A typical request with 1,500 input + 500 output tokens costs about $0.0225. For 1,000 such requests, you'd pay approximately $22.50 USD. Use GPT-5.4 nano ($0.20/$1.25) to reduce that cost by ~97%.\n\n## What is the cheapest LLM API for high-volume applications?\n\nFor high-volume workloads in 2026, GPT-5.4 nano ($0.20/1M input) and Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite ($0.25/1M input) are the most cost-effective capable options. Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1.00/$5.00) is competitive when output quality matters more.\n\n## How do I reduce my LLM API costs in production?\n\nKey strategies: use prompt caching (saves 75–90% on repeated context), switch to GPT-5.4 nano or Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite for classification tasks, enable batch processing for async jobs, and compress system prompts.\n\n## More API Cost Calculators\n\n11 free tools — click to open the full interactive calculator with all providers and options.\n\n[Vector Database Cost\nPinecone vs Supabase vs Qdrant vs Weaviate\nOpen Calculator →\n](/vector-database-cost)\n\n[Image Generation Cost\nDALL·E 3 vs Stable Diffusion vs Flux\nOpen Calculator →\n](/image-generation-cost)\n\n[Payment Processor Fees\nStripe vs Paddle vs Lemon Squeezy\nOpen Calculator →\n](/payment-processor-fees)\n\n[Cloud VPS Comparison\nHetzner vs DigitalOcean vs Vultr\nOpen Calculator →\n](/cloud-vps-comparison)\n\n[STT / TTS API Cost\nWhisper vs ElevenLabs vs Deepgram\nOpen Calculator →\n](/stt-tts-api-cost)\n\n[Serverless Cost Calculator\nLambda vs Vercel vs Cloudflare Workers\nOpen Calculator →\n](/serverless-cost-calculator)\n\n[API Gateway Pricing\nAWS API GW vs Cloudflare vs Kong\nOpen Calculator →\n](/api-gateway-pricing)\n\n[Embedding API Cost\nOpenAI vs Cohere vs Voyage AI\nOpen Calculator →\n](/embedding-api-cost)\n\n[AI Agent Cost\nMulti-step pipeline pricing per run\nOpen Calculator →\n](/ai-agent-cost)\n\n[AI Coding Tool Cost\nCursor vs Copilot vs Claude Code\nOpen Calculator →\n](/ai-coding-tool-cost)\n\n[Auth Provider Cost\nClerk vs Supabase Auth vs Auth0\nOpen Calculator →\n](/auth-provider-cost)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives", "canonical_source": "https://apicalculators.com/", "published_at": "2026-06-14 15:38:33+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-14 15:42:24.726053+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "large-language-models", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Google", "GPT-5.5", "GPT-5.4 nano", "Claude Sonnet 4.6", "Gemini 3.5 Flash"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-free-api-cost-calculators-know-your-bill-before-it-arrives.jsonld"}}