Use Case Cost Recipes

How much does a real AI product actually cost to run? We break down concrete scenarios with assumed token volumes, model recommendations, and total monthly cost across model tiers.

Cost recipes

💬
Customer support chatbot
A typical SaaS chatbot serving 30k conversations per month costs $45–$340 depending on the model.
$45–$340/mo
📚
RAG / document Q&A
A RAG app serving 5k queries per month over a moderate document corpus runs $35–$240/month.
$35–$240/mo
⌨️
Coding assistant (IDE plugin)
A coding assistant for 100 engineers costs $1,800–$22,000 per month — Sonnet-tier is the sweet spot.
$1,800–$22,000/mo
📦
Batch document processing
Processing 1M documents per month via batch APIs runs $400–$3,200 — half the on-demand price.
$400–$3,200/mo
🤖
Autonomous research agent
Multi-step agents are token-hungry: 100 tasks/day costs $180–$2,400/month because each task burns 20+ reasoning steps.
$180–$2,400/mo
📝
Content summarizer
Summarizing 100k articles per month runs $40–$400 depending on model choice and batch usage.
$40–$400/mo
🌍
Translation service
Translating 1M words per month (roughly 1.3M tokens) runs $15–$280 — translation is one of the cheapest LLM workloads.
$15–$280/mo
🏷️
Email/text classifier
Classifying 1.5M items per month (50k/day) runs $20–$180 — classification is the cheapest LLM workload because outputs are tiny.
$20–$180/mo

What makes our recipes different

Have a use case we don't cover? Email us and we'll add it. Most new recipes ship within a week.