Estimate document Q&A AI cost before it adds up
Enter how many questions your document Q&A assistant answers each month to get a Low / Likely / High monthly API cost estimate. Everything runs locally in your browser — no data is sent to any server.
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Configure your document Q&A
Estimated monthly cost
This estimates the model-inference cost of answering a question once relevant text has already been retrieved. It does not include document ingestion, OCR, embeddings, vector-database hosting, or retrieval infrastructure — those are billed separately by whatever tools you use to build the retrieval step.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Actual costs depend on your provider's exact tokeniser, real retrieval size, and your billing tier.
How this estimate works
- Instruction / system prompt
- The user's question
- Retrieved document context
Reads the question and the retrieved passages, then writes an answer.
An answer grounded in the retrieved text.
"RAG" (retrieval-augmented generation) simply means: find the most relevant pieces of your documents for a question, then ask the model to answer using only that retrieved text. This calculator starts counting cost after that retrieval step has already happened.
What's not included: retrieval infrastructure
This calculator estimates the model-inference cost of answering a question once relevant text has already been retrieved — it does not include document ingestion, OCR, embeddings, vector-database hosting or search, reranking, or any other retrieval infrastructure.
Those steps are billed separately by whatever embedding model, vector database, and retrieval service you use to build the retrieval pipeline, and are not part of this estimate.
Low / Likely / High explained
Focused retrieval, short question, short answer.
Standard retrieval depth and typical question/answer length. Plan against this number.
Broad retrieval, long question, long answer. Budget against this.
Cut your cost
Example monthly costs
These worked examples use the same default assumptions as the calculator above — medium-length questions and answers, standard retrieval depth, a standard instruction prompt — with GPT-5.4 Mini. Only the number of questions per month changes between rows. Use the calculator above to model your own usage or a different model.
| Usage level | Questions / month | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light usage | 100 | $0.1290 | $0.2025 | $0.3000 |
| Typical usage | 500 | $0.6450 | $1.01 | $1.50 |
| Heavy usage | 2,000 | $2.58 | $4.05 | $6.00 |
Caveats
- These estimates use the same reference token ranges as the site's chatbot calculator for question and answer length, accurate to ±10–15% for plain English text.
- Each provider uses a different tokeniser. Actual token counts may differ ±5–10% between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and DeepSeek for the same content.
- Retrieval infrastructure cost (embeddings, vector database, reranking) is not included. This tool only estimates the cost of the model's answer-generation call itself.
- 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.
- "Focused"/"standard"/"broad" retrieval are this project's own descriptive labels for typical retrieved-context sizes, not a claim of any industry-standard terminology — use "Custom" and enter an exact token count for the most accurate estimate.
- The context-window warning above appears when the High scenario'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.