AI classification & content moderation cost calculator
Estimate the cost of classifying or moderating content with a general-purpose LLM — sentiment classification, intent classification, topic/category labeling, toxicity classification, safety review, content moderation, policy classification, and support- ticket routing are all the same underlying workload, priced here in one calculator. Enter your item volume, content size, and output mode to get a Low / Likely / High monthly cost estimate. Everything runs locally in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
- No login
- No credit card
- No API calls
- Estimate only
Configure your classification/moderation workload
Estimated monthly cost
This estimates general-purpose LLM inference cost. It does not represent any dedicated, free, or specialized moderation API — those are billed separately (or offered free) by the specific service you use, unless that exact API is itself priced elsewhere in T9's data.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Actual costs depend on your provider's exact tokeniser, your real content and policy, and your billing tier.
How this estimate works
- Classification/moderation instruction or policy
- The content being classified
Reads the content against the instruction and returns a result.
A small, structured result — a label, an optional score, and optionally a short one-line rationale.
This is an input-heavy, near-fixed-output workload — the defining characteristic that separates it from a chat or content-generation calculator, where output length scales with the task. Here, output stays small no matter how long the content being classified is.
Common use cases
Sentiment classification, intent classification, topic/category labeling, toxicity classification, safety review, content moderation, policy classification, and support- ticket routing are all priced identically by this calculator — the same input-heavy, output-light shape applies regardless of which label set or policy you're applying. See the worked examples below for three concrete cases.
Why longer content increases cost
The full content being classified — a message, a comment, a support ticket, a post under moderation review — is sent as input on every call. A short comment and a long ticket thread cost very differently on the input side, even with an identical policy.
Why output mode matters, but stays small
A label alone costs almost nothing. Adding a confidence score adds a little more. Adding a short one-line explanation adds more still — but even in explanation mode, output remains far smaller than a written response, because a classification result is never meant to be a full reply.
What's not included: dedicated moderation APIs
This estimates general-purpose LLM inference cost. It does not represent any dedicated, free, or specialized moderation API unless that specific API is itself present as a priced entry in T9's data — none currently is. If you're using a provider's own free or separately-priced moderation endpoint, check that service's own pricing directly.
Low / Likely / High explained
Short content, a minimal instruction, label-only output.
Typical content length and a standard policy. Plan against this number.
Long content, a detailed policy, explanation-mode output. Budget against this.
Cut your cost
Example monthly classification costs
These worked examples use the same default assumptions as the calculator above — short content, a standard instruction, label+score output — with GPT-5.4 Mini. Only the number of items per month changes between rows.
| Usage level | Items / month | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light usage | 500 | $0.2438 | $0.4155 | $0.6450 |
| Typical usage | 5,000 | $2.44 | $4.16 | $6.45 |
| Heavy usage | 50,000 | $24.38 | $41.55 | $64.50 |
And here's the per-item cost for three common use cases — support-ticket routing, sentiment classification, and content moderation review — with GPT-5.4 Mini, each with its own content size, instruction complexity, and output mode:
| Use case | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support-ticket routing | $0.000488 | $0.000831 | $0.001290 |
| Sentiment classification | $0.000344 | $0.000590 | $0.000947 |
| Content moderation review | $0.001725 | $0.002955 | $0.004635 |
Caveats
- These estimates use the same reference document-length and instruction-prompt token ranges as the site's document summary calculator, accurate to ±10–15% for plain English content.
- Output-mode token figures (label / label+score / explanation) are this project's own descriptive assumption, not a provider-published figure — no provider publishes a token size for a classification label, since it depends on the exact label set and output schema.
- Each provider uses a different tokeniser. Actual token counts may differ ±5–10% between providers for the same content.
- Dedicated, free, or specialized moderation APIs are not priced here. This tool only estimates general-purpose LLM inference cost.
- Prices shown are manually verified against each provider's official pricing page as of 2026-09-08. AI provider pricing changes frequently — verify at your provider's official pricing page before making budget decisions.
- The long-context pricing tier, where a selected model has one, is resolved against each item's own input size, never a monthly aggregate.
- The context-window warning above appears when an item's combined tokens exceed 80% of the selected model's context window — a safety margin before truncation or failure risk, not a hard limit at 100%.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Always confirm against your provider's usage dashboard and official pricing before committing a budget.