AI task costs · in pounds
What everyday business tasks cost with AI
What 10 common jobs cost to run through AI model APIs, per job and per month, with up to 24 models each and the cheapest first. Every assumption is on the page. These tables compare price only, not quality.
Prices of from OpenRouter's public API price list · converted at the ECB reference rate of ($1 = £0.7538) · Urbano DX
Ten tasks: the cheapest, middle and dearest model
| Task | Volume | Cheapest a month | Middle of the range | Dearest a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Summarise a 50-page PDF | 20 PDFs a month | 2.2pgpt-oss-120b | 38pMistral Large 4 | £5.88GPT-6 Astra |
| Draft replies to 1,000 customer emails | 1,000 emails a month | 12pgpt-oss-120b | £1.98Mistral Large 4 | £32.79GPT-6 Astra |
| Run a support chatbot: 10,000 chats a month | 10,000 chats a month | £3.76gpt-oss-120b | £32.87Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | £568.04GPT-6 Astra |
| Classify 10,000 support tickets | 10,000 tickets a month | 21pgpt-oss-120b | £3.65Mistral Large 4 | £56.53GPT-6 Astra |
| Extract fields from 1,000 scanned invoices | 1,000 invoices a month | 13pDeepSeek V4.1 Flash | £1.44Gemini 3.8 Flash | £19.22GPT-6 Astra |
| Transcribe 100 hours of calls | 100 hours a month | 90pNemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming Multilingual 0.6B | £13.57Muse Voice Transcribe 1.0 | £72.36Chirp 3 |
| Write 500 product descriptions | 500 descriptions a month | 2.7pgpt-oss-120b | 41pMistral Large 4 | £7.54GPT-6 Astra |
| Translate a 20,000-word website | 2,000 changed words a month | 0.051pgpt-oss-120b | 0.69pMistral Large 4 | 15pGPT-6 Astra |
| Generate 100 marketing images | 100 images a month | 53pRecraft V4.1 Flash | £2.64Seedream 5.0 Lite | £15.83Recraft V4.1 Pro |
| Answer questions over 10,000 internal documents | 2,000 questions a month | 32pgpt-oss-120b | £5.40Mistral Large 4 | £88.19GPT-6 Astra |
The middle of the range is the median model of each task's list. Open a task for every model, the cost of a single job and the workload behind it.
How the numbers are worked out
- Each workload is written out on its page: tokens in and out, the share read from a prompt cache, audio minutes or images. Cost = workload × the model's listed rate, so you can check any figure with a calculator.
- Rates are OpenRouter's API prices in our snapshot of , the same ones on our model pricing pages. Buying from the developer directly can cost a little more or less. When rates move, the price change log records it.
- US dollars become pounds at the European Central Bank reference rate of : €1 = $1.1195 = £0.84385, so $1 = £0.7538. VAT, card fees and top-up fees are not included.
- About 0.75 English words make one token. Each model's tokenizer counts the same text a little differently, so treat a figure as a close estimate, not a quote.
- Models that reason before answering can add thinking tokens, billed as output. These figures count none, so a model with thinking switched on can cost more.
- This compares price only. It says nothing about which model does the job well: a cheap model that gets a tenth of the answers wrong can cost more in staff time than it saves.
Want one of these jobs running on your own data, with the cost measured? See the fixed-price AI pilot