Tokens per dollar calculator
Most pricing tools answer "what will this cost?". This one answers the question you ask when the budget is the fixed thing: how much work does my money actually buy?
Token yield leaderboard
How many tokens one dollar buys on each model, at the default 3:1 input-to-output mix. The twelve highest-yield models tracked here.
| # | Model | Provider | Tokens per $1 | Blended / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen3.7 Flash | Alibaba | 18,181,818 | $0.055 |
| 2 | Llama 3.1 8B Instant (via Groq) | Groq | 17,391,304 | $0.0575 |
| 3 | Nova Micro | Amazon | 16,326,531 | $0.0613 |
| 4 | Command R7B | Cohere | 15,238,095 | $0.0656 |
| 5 | Nova Lite 1.0 | Amazon | 9,523,810 | $0.105 |
| 6 | Llama 4 Scout | Meta | 7,407,407 | $0.135 |
| 7 | Step 3.5 Flash | StepFun | 6,666,667 | $0.15 |
| 8 | GPT-4.1 nano | OpenAI | 5,714,286 | $0.175 |
| 9 | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | 5,714,286 | $0.175 | |
| 10 | DeepSeek V4 Flash | DeepSeek | 5,714,286 | $0.175 |
| 11 | Sonar Small Online | Perplexity | 5,000,000 | $0.20 |
| 12 | Mistral Small 4 | Mistral | 3,809,524 | $0.2625 |
How this is calculated
Your ratio sets how the budget splits between input and output. At a ratio of 3, every output token is accompanied by three input tokens, so the effective cost per token is (3 × input rate + 1 × output rate) ÷ 4. Dividing your budget by that gives the total token count, which is then split back out into its input and output halves.
Set the ratio to a large number to model a prompt-heavy workload such as document analysis or retrieval, or to a small one for generation-heavy work such as long-form writing. The gap between those two cases on the same model and the same budget is usually startling, and it is the main reason single-number model rankings mislead.
Why more tokens is not the same as more value
A high token yield only matters if the model uses its tokens well. A cheap model that needs three attempts, or that produces four hundred words where a better one produces a hundred, can burn through its yield advantage entirely, and you pay for the extra output at the output rate, which is the expensive one. Use this page to size a budget and set expectations; use real evaluation on your own task to choose the model.
Tokens per dollar questions
How many tokens can I get for $1?
It ranges from roughly 14,815 tokens on the most expensive model tracked here to about 18,181,818 on the cheapest, at a 3:1 input-to-output mix. That is the same dollar buying wildly different amounts of work depending on which model you point it at.
How many tokens is a page of text?
Roughly 500-750 tokens for a page of English prose, or about 4 characters per token as a working rule. Code, non-English text, and heavily formatted content all tokenise less efficiently. The token counter gives a closer estimate from a real sample.
Why does the input-to-output ratio change the answer so much?
Because output typically costs four to six times what input does. A budget spent entirely on input buys several times more tokens than the same budget spent on output, so a model that looks cheap on a prompt-heavy workload can look expensive on a generation-heavy one.
Is tokens-per-dollar a good way to choose a model?
It is a good way to size a budget and a poor way to choose a model on its own, because it says nothing about how many tokens each model needs to do the job. A model that answers in 200 tokens at twice the rate beats one that rambles for 800 tokens at half the rate.