Clearer AI costs. Better planning.
T9 Token Budget is a free public tool for understanding and estimating AI model costs before they become a surprise.
What T9 is
AI APIs are commonly priced by tokens — a unit most people building or planning around AI have never had to reason about before. T9 Token Budget translates that into a practical monthly cost range. It covers four common AI workloads — a support/sales chatbot, meeting-transcript summaries, document summaries, and document Q&A — each with its own calculator. Every one turns a few inputs about your use case into a Low / Likely / High monthly cost range, using published, dated model prices and documented token assumptions — never a single guessed number. Everything is calculated in your browser; see the calculators overview to pick the right one.
Why T9 exists
Most AI cost surprises happen after the first invoice, when the cause is hard to unwind. T9 exists to move that conversation earlier — to make token cost legible while you are still planning, comparing models, and deciding what to build. AI cost is genuinely hard to predict in advance, because it depends on several things at once: which model you use, how much input and output each request involves, what your workload actually looks like, and how often content — like a system prompt or conversation history — gets resent and re-billed on every request.
Principles
Precision
Every price comes from a provider's own official documentation — never a guess or a remembered number.
Transparency
Sources, verification dates, assumptions, and limitations are documented, not hidden — see the methodology.
Clarity
Token-based pricing is hard to reason about. T9's job is to turn it into a plain, understandable estimate.
Usefulness
No login, no account, no file uploads — just a practical tool you can use in a few minutes.
What T9 does — and does not do
T9 does
- Estimate AI usage costs for four common workloads
- Compare model prices across providers
- Provide workload-specific calculators
- Document its own methodology and sources
T9 does not
- Bill you, or require an account or payment
- Sell or provide access to any AI provider's API
- Represent an official provider invoice
- Guarantee future provider pricing
- Upload your files, or call any AI provider
- Track what you enter — nothing leaves your browser
How trust is built
T9's numbers are only useful if they can be checked. Every price is sourced from a provider's own official pricing documentation, dated, and re-verified when it changes — see exactly how in the methodology. Every calculation runs locally in your browser's own JavaScript; the numbers you type never reach a server, because none of these tools has one to send them to (see the full privacy policy). And every result stays a planning estimate, not a billing guarantee — see the disclaimer for the full boundaries of what these tools do and don't promise.
T9 Token Budget is available in English, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.
Have a question or found a pricing issue? Contact us or read our methodology.