AI task costs · in pounds
What it costs to translate a 20,000-word website with AI
gpt-oss-120b is the cheapest of the 24 models priced, at 0.051p for 2,000 changed words a month (0.51p whole website, once). The dearest, GPT-6 Astra, costs 15p; the middle of the range is Mistral Large 4 at 0.69p.
How much does it cost to machine-translate a whole website into another language with an AI model? The answer below covers 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
Cost by model, cheapest first
The workload
- 20,000 English words sent in 20 requests of 1,000 words: 1,330 tokens of text plus 500 tokens of instructions and glossary, 1,830 input tokens each.
- The translation into French, German or Spanish takes about 1.2 times the English token count: 1,600 output tokens per request.
- After the first pass, 2,000 changed words a month: a tenth of the first pass.
- A person should still review the result before it goes live.
| Model | Whole website, once | 2,000 changed words a month | Rate used (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-oss-120bOpenAI | 0.51p | 0.051p | $0.037 in, $0.17 out per 1M tokens |
| Gemma 4 31BGoogle | 1.1p | 0.11p | $0.09 in, $0.34 out per 1M tokens |
| Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic | 1.5p | 0.15p | $0.10 in, $0.50 out per 1M tokens |
| GPT-6 LunaOpenAI | 1.5p | 0.15p | $0.10 in, $0.50 out per 1M tokens |
| Qwen3.8 FlashQwen | 1.5p | 0.15p | $0.15 in, $0.47 out per 1M tokens |
| Mistral Small 4Mistral | 1.9p | 0.19p | $0.15 in, $0.60 out per 1M tokens |
| DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek | 2.2p | 0.22p | $0.02016 in, $0.891 out per 1M tokens |
| Llama 3.3 70B InstructMeta | 3.5p | 0.35p | $0.59 in, $0.79 out per 1M tokens |
| GPT-4.1 MiniOpenAI | 5p | 0.5p | $0.40 in, $1.60 out per 1M tokens |
| Gemini 2.5 FlashGoogle | 6.9p | 0.69p | $0.30 in, $2.50 out per 1M tokens |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash LiteGoogle | 6.9p | 0.69p | $0.30 in, $2.50 out per 1M tokens |
| Mistral Large 4Mistral | 6.9p | 0.69p | $0.68 in, $2.09 out per 1M tokens |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423DeepSeek | 7.2p | 0.72p | $0.9553 in, $1.911 out per 1M tokens |
| Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle | 11p | 1.1p | $0.75 in, $3.75 out per 1M tokens |
| Muse Spark 1.3Meta | 14p | 1.4p | $1.25 in, $4.25 out per 1M tokens |
| Claude Haiku 4.5Anthropic | 15p | 1.5p | $1.00 in, $5.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Grok 4.7SpaceXAI | 20p | 2p | $2.00 in, $6.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Qwen3.8 Max (0902)Qwen | 20p | 2p | $2.00 in, $6.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic | 30p | 3p | $2.00 in, $10.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Gemini 4 ArgonGoogle | 30p | 3p | $2.00 in, $10.00 out per 1M tokens |
| GPT-6.1 SolOpenAI | 30p | 3p | $2.00 in, $10.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Claude Opus 5.5Anthropic | 59p | 5.9p | $4.00 in, $20.00 out per 1M tokens |
| Claude Fable 5.1Anthropic | £1.48 | 15p | $10.00 in, $50.00 out per 1M tokens |
| GPT-6 AstraOpenAI | £1.48 | 15p | $10.00 in, $50.00 out per 1M tokens |
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.
Other tasks
- Summarise a 50-page PDF
- Draft replies to 1,000 customer emails
- Run a support chatbot: 10,000 chats a month
- Classify 10,000 support tickets
- Extract fields from 1,000 scanned invoices
- Transcribe 100 hours of calls
- Write 500 product descriptions
- Generate 100 marketing images
- Answer questions over 10,000 internal documents
Want this running on your own data, with the cost measured? See the fixed-price AI pilot