AI Startup
Financial Tools
Calculate LLM costs, plan infrastructure capacity, and model unit economics for AI-native products. Don't let API costs destroy your margins.
Current LLM Pricing (2025)
| Provider | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI GPT-4 Turbo | $10/M tokens | $30/M tokens |
| OpenAI GPT-4o | $2.50/M tokens | $10/M tokens |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3/M tokens | $15/M tokens |
| Claude 3 Opus | $15/M tokens | $75/M tokens |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.25/M tokens | $5/M tokens |
| Llama 3 (self-hosted) | Compute cost | ~$0.50-2/M* |
* Self-hosted costs vary by hardware. Prices as of Jan 2025.
AI Startup Calculators
Built for the unique economics of AI products
API Token Cost Estimator
Calculate OpenAI, Claude, and other LLM API costs. Estimate monthly spend before the bill arrives.
Database Capacity Planner
Project storage needs for embeddings, vectors, and training data. Plan infrastructure scaling.
Unit Economics Calculator
Model LTV:CAC for AI products with high inference costs. Understand true unit profitability.
Runway Calculator
AI startups burn fast on compute. Track runway carefully.
AI Startup Financial Challenges
Challenge: API costs scale with usage
Solution: Model per-query costs and pass-through to customers or optimize prompts
Challenge: Inference costs eat margins
Solution: Calculate true unit economics including compute costs
Challenge: GPU/compute is expensive
Solution: Plan infrastructure capacity and right-size resources
Challenge: High burn rate pre-revenue
Solution: Track runway obsessively, raise with buffer
Unit Economics for AI Products
The key challenge: Inference costs are variable. Unlike traditional SaaS where compute is relatively fixed, AI products have costs that scale with each API call.
Calculate per-query cost:
Cost per query = (Input tokens × Input price) + (Output tokens × Output price) Example (GPT-4 Turbo): - 500 input tokens × $0.00001 = $0.005 - 200 output tokens × $0.00003 = $0.006 - Total: $0.011 per query
If your average customer makes 1,000 queries/month and pays $50/month, your cost is $11/customer, leaving $39 gross margin (78%).
Track closely: As usage grows, costs can surprise you. Model different usage scenarios in your financial projections.
Model Your AI Economics
Understand costs before you scale. Optimize margins before you raise.
Start Calculating