Estimate document-summary AI cost before it adds up
Enter how many documents you summarize with AI 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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- No API calls
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Configure your document summaries
Estimated monthly cost
This estimates the cost of summarizing text you already have in a processable format. It does not include OCR, PDF parsing, document conversion, file storage, embeddings, retrieval, or any other document-processing service — those are billed separately, if they apply to your pipeline at all.
This is an estimate, not a billing guarantee. Actual costs depend on your provider's exact tokeniser, real document length, and your billing tier.
How this estimate works
- Instruction / system prompt
- The document text
Reads the full document, then writes a summary.
A summary, and optionally a structured key-points list.
Document length is measured in words, not pages — a "page" has no fixed word count, so this calculator never claims an exact page-to-token conversion. Pick a preset or enter an exact word count.
What's not included: OCR and document processing
This calculator estimates the cost of summarizing text you already have in a processable format — it does not include OCR, PDF parsing, image extraction, document conversion, file storage, embeddings, or retrieval.
If your pipeline also extracts text from scanned images or PDFs, that step is billed separately by whatever OCR or document-processing service you use, and is not part of this estimate.
Low / Likely / High explained
Shorter end of the length preset, brief instruction prompt.
Typical document length and a standard instruction prompt. Plan against this number.
Longer end of the length preset and a detailed instruction prompt. Budget against this.
Cut your cost
Example monthly costs
These worked examples use the same default assumptions as the calculator above — a medium-length document, a standard summary, a standard instruction prompt, key-points extraction on — with GPT-5.4 Mini. Only the number of documents per month changes between rows. Use the calculator above to model your own usage or a different model.
| Usage level | Documents / month | Low | Likely | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light usage | 10 | $0.0348 | $0.0559 | $0.0825 |
| Typical usage | 30 | $0.1044 | $0.1676 | $0.2475 |
| Heavy usage | 100 | $0.3480 | $0.5588 | $0.8250 |
Caveats
- These estimates use a documented words-to-tokens ratio (1.3 tokens per word), consistent with the site's characters ÷ 4 ≈ tokens rule, 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.
- OCR, PDF parsing, and document conversion cost are not included. This tool only estimates the cost of the summarization 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.
- Document length presets use a fixed word count, not a page count — a "page" has no single defensible word-count conversion, so pick "Custom" and enter an exact word 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.