What It Costs to Generate Blog Drafts with AI
Long-form writing is output-heavy. A 1,500-word draft is roughly 2,000 output tokens, and output tokens are priced higher than input.
Typical monthly workload
- Input tokens
- 2,000,000
- Output tokens
- 6,000,000
- Requests / day
- 100
Illustrative estimate. Adjust the sliders below to match your own volume.
Recommended setup
Draft outlines and sections with a low-cost model, then use a stronger model only for final editing of the most important pages.
Monthly cost by model for this workload
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Est. monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 1.5 Flash | $0.075 | $0.30 | $1.95 |
| DeepSeek V3 | $0.140 | $0.28 | $1.96 |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash | $0.100 | $0.40 | $2.60 |
| Qwen 2.5 72B | $0.350 | $0.40 | $3.10 |
| GPT-4o Mini | $0.150 | $0.60 | $3.90 |
| Llama 3.3 70B (Groq/Together) | $0.590 | $0.79 | $5.92 |
| DeepSeek R1 (Reasoning) | $0.550 | $2.19 | $14.24 |
| Claude 3.5 Haiku | $0.800 | $4.00 | $25.60 |
| o3-mini (Reasoning) | $1.100 | $4.40 | $28.60 |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.250 | $5.00 | $32.50 |
| Mistral Large 2 | $2.000 | $6.00 | $40.00 |
| Grok 2 | $2.000 | $10.00 | $64.00 |
| GPT-4o (Omni) | $2.500 | $10.00 | $65.00 |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3.000 | $15.00 | $96.00 |
| o1 (Reasoning) | $15.000 | $60.00 | $390.00 |
Computed from list prices and the workload above (2,000,000 input and 6,000,000 output tokens per month), with no caching or batch discounts. Real bills vary.
How to cut this cost
- Outline first
Generate and approve a short outline before the full draft so you do not pay to regenerate long rejected articles.
- Edit, do not rewrite
Ask for targeted revisions instead of full regenerations to avoid paying for the whole output again.
Simulate your own spend
Quick Workload Presets
Pick a scenario or fine-tune token parameters and cloud host below.
Token & Usage ParametersLLM API
Switching from GPT-4o ($195.00/mo) to Gemini 1.5 Flash ($5.85/mo) saves 97%.
Lowest cost per token, high-frequency tasks, real-time audio/video
State-of-the-art open economics, high-performance general intelligence
Real-time conversational streaming, vision, multimodal processing at speed
High-volume text processing, fast chatbots, structured JSON extraction
Top open-weights coding, math, and multilingual benchmark performance
Open-weights privacy, self-hosting or ultra-cheap hosted inferencing
Complex math, algorithmic reasoning, open deep-thinking workflows
Rapid code completion, customer service, fast structured parsing
Cost-effective scientific & coding reasoning, high-accuracy logic
Massive context (2M tokens), full video/audio analysis, large codebases
Multilingual tasks, European compliance, enterprise code generation
Real-time information synthesis, creative generation, vision analysis
Complex multimodal reasoning, coding, and production enterprise apps
Software engineering, nuanced writing, complex agentic tool use
Advanced mathematics, algorithmic coding, PhD-level scientific logic
Frequently asked questions
Will unedited AI content rank well?
Search engines focus on helpfulness, not how content is produced. Thin, unedited, mass-produced pages tend to perform poorly, so budget time for human review and original value.