Forecast your monthly AI writing bill before it eats your AdSense margin. Plug in word count, posting cadence, and how many revision passes you actually do — get a per-post and per-month cost across GPT-5, Claude 4.6, Gemini 3, DeepSeek, and 25+ more models.
If you publish three posts a week and run each one through an outline pass, a draft pass, an edit pass, and an SEO rewrite, you're not paying for one article — you're paying for four. Every pass re-sends the full prompt and the prior draft. By the time you hit publish, that "$0.10 article" has quietly turned into a $0.60 article. Multiply by 12 a month and your AI line item is the same size as your hosting bill.
Most pricing pages give you a flat number per million tokens. That's useful for accounting, useless for content workflow planning. As a blogger, the question you actually have to answer is: "If I scale to 20 posts a month with the same multi-pass quality bar, does the AI cost still fit inside my Mediavine RPM?"
This calculator is built to short-circuit that surprise. Enter the shape of your workflow — outline length, draft word count, revision count, and posting cadence — and it cross-multiplies against the published rates for every major model. Output: a sortable monthly bill you can drop straight into a Notion page or a content P&L spreadsheet.
Before you commit to a topic, model whether the AI cost survives the affiliate or display-ad payout. A 2,500-word product roundup that pulls a $0.08 RPM only earns about $1.40 from 17,000 page-views — if your AI workflow already costs $0.85 per draft, you're publishing for thin margins. The calculator answers that ratio in seconds.
Bloggers love the outline → draft → edit → SEO loop. The math gets brutal because each pass re-sends the prior draft. Run your real number of passes through the calculator and you'll usually find that 60-75% of the cost lives in passes 3 and 4. Cutting one pass or moving it to a cheaper model is the single biggest lever.
Anthropic raises a tier? OpenAI ships a cheaper mini? Drop the same workflow into the comparison view and see whether changing models is worth the prompt-tuning effort. Most bloggers discover that 80% of their cost is in one polish call that has no business being on the frontier tier.
If you run a portfolio of niche blogs — recipes, finance, travel, parenting — the cost per post varies wildly depending on how much research context you paste into the prompt. The calculator's input/output split lets you set a per-niche budget instead of one blanket number, so the high-RPM niches subsidize the lower ones.
If you ghostwrite for clients or run a small content shop, model the AI cost into your per-word price before quoting. A 1,500-word post at $0.05/word is a $75 deliverable. If your AI cost is $0.60 and your editor's hour is $35, the margin is real but tight. Plug it into the calculator and price with eyes open.
Three failure modes show up over and over in production AI writing workflows:
The calculator surfaces all three by design — it asks for context size, output length, revision count, and post cadence separately, then recomputes the bill against every supported provider. See OpenAI's pricing page for the canonical input/output split, or Anthropic's Claude pricing for the latest Sonnet and Opus tier numbers, or Gemini's pricing matrix for context-window tier breakpoints that matter when you paste long research dumps.
To make the numbers concrete, here's how a typical "mid-traffic niche blog" lands when run through the calculator:
| Model | Cost / post | Monthly bill |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 | $0.58 | $6.96 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $0.42 | $5.04 |
| Gemini 3 Flash | $0.06 | $0.72 |
| DeepSeek V3.1 | $0.04 | $0.48 |
| Mixed (Flash draft + Sonnet polish) | $0.18 | $2.16 |
Numbers above are illustrative. Plug your real workflow into the live tool to get a current comparison with the latest published rates. The "mixed" row is the pattern most successful bloggers settle into — a cheap workhorse for drafting, a smarter model for the final pass.
An AI bill is one line on the content P&L. The other lines that matter — and where the TinyTools suite already covers the rest:
The pattern is the same across all of them: free, single-purpose, no signup. If you want a broader view of how niche bloggers think about AI economics in 2026, Search Engine Land and Detailed both publish solid coverage of the search-traffic side of the equation.
Yes — the comparison table is plain HTML, so you can copy it into a Notion proposal, a client SOW, or a Linear issue. Many freelance writers use the per-post number as a floor when pricing AI-assisted retainers.
Yes. GPT-5 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini Flash, and DeepSeek's full lineup are all in the comparison. Mini tiers are usually 5-20x cheaper than the flagship and good enough for outline and meta work.
The calculator reads from a price table that we update whenever a major provider publishes a change. Expect 1-3 day lag on smaller providers, near-real-time on the top five.
Self-hosted GPU pricing is too workload-dependent to model accurately, but we cover the major hosted serverless rates (Together, Fireworks, Groq) for Llama, Mistral, Qwen, and DeepSeek — those are a reasonable upper bound for what self-hosting saves.