I was looking to buy the open air API for my simple NLP classification problem.

Given the current price for chat gpt 4o 2.5$/1 M input tokens I have calculated that it would cost me less than 2$ a month to use the API?

My output is 3 class classification so the output cost is nearly next to nothing.

I feel like something is off..

Does anybody have any real life experience using their API?

I’ve just paid $5 for 20k tokens is it for real?

EDIT: The answer appears to be "sign up to platform.openai.com instead of ChatGPT, because then you only get charged for the tokens you use, and not the $20/month ChatGPT charge"

Thanks to everyone who answered, I'm up and running, I'll feedback if it starts costing too much!

EDIT 2: Apparently google is too hard for a lot of people, so here's a FAQ for all of those who hijacked this for something else:

1. Just read the docs on the OpenAI integration, it's all there, no hardware required unless you want to talk to it in which case you'll need one of the hardware voice assistants.

2. I'm using it to make my smart home more intelligent - there are loads of examples on Youtube of what people are doing, I want to use OpenAI to do the same thing, so I followed the tutorials on there and got it working

Yes, this is blunt, yes, I think people should share knowledge, but I'm also not going to do your homework for you.

================

I don't have the money or the interest to spend on running a local LLM, so I want to run hosted.

I've noticed the OpenAI API is billed "per million tokens" rather than ChatGPT which is billed at $20USD/month, so I'm starting to work out how much it will cost me to run OpenAI as the backend for my HA setup.

Please note that I am only interested in hearing from people who are already running OpenAI with HA - if you're not doing this, I'm sure your project is awesome and if this doesn't work then I'll definitely be interested in what I should use instead, but right now I need this specific question answered.

Thanks in advance for your time!

Has anyone worked out the average monthly cost that you could be paying, if you build an app with openAI's ChatGPT API?

What's the rough monthly cost per user? And how much fee you have to be collecting from the user, to break even? Or how much ad you have to be showing?

Is it financially feasible to actually use OpenAI's API to build something?

Let's say we build a Replika's clone, a chat bot that you can chat with.

Assuming we use the chat-gpt3.5-turbo API, which costs:

USD0.002/1000 tokens

Regardless of what the bot is doing, telling stories, summarising PDF, whatever, we have to be inevitably stuffing a lot of past conversations or the "context" of the conversation into the prompt, and effectively using up all 4000 tokens in every interaction.

So for every question and answer from AI, we use:

full 4000 tokens.

That will be:

USD0.008 per interaction

And assuming we built this app and shipped, user started using. Assume an active user ask a question to a bot once every 5 minute, and they interact with your app for about 2 hours per day:

That will be:

12 interactions per hour or

24 interactions per day or

720 interactions per month

Based on the cost of 0.008 per interaction, the cost for 1 active user will be:

720x0.008 = USD5.76 for chat-gpt3.5-turbo

(And i am not even talking about GPT4's pricing, which is roughly 20 times more expensive).

My understanding from my past apps is that, there is no way, that Google Admobs banner, interstitial ad, etc. can contribute USD5.76 for each active user. (Or can it?)

And therefore, the app can't be an ad-sponsored free app. It has to be a paid app. It has to be an app that is collecting substantially more than USD5.76 per month from each user to be profitable.

Or imagine, we don't sell to end user directly, we build a "chat bot plugin" for organisations for their employees, or for their customers. So if this organisation has 1000 monthly active users, we have to be collecting way more than USD5760 per month?

I hope I was wrong somewhere in the calculation here. What do you think?

TLDR If I build a Replika clone and I have users as sticky as Replika users, monthly fee per user to OpenAI is $5.76 and my user monthly subscription is $8 (Replika).

Hey there! I wanted to share a tool I built, that I think might be useful to the people in this subreddit.

I find that ChatGPT Plus is amazing but $20/month is quite a lot - especially compared to what I would spend by accessing GPT from the API instead. I know a lot of people are not aware of this, so I built a calculator that asks you questions about your normal usage of chatGPT, and tells you how much you would spend if you switched to the API.

I thought I'd share the calculator I built - let me know what you think!

Here is the link: https://www.quartzite.ai/tools/openai-api-cost-calculator

Thanks!

Let’s say someone implements GPT-4 in their app. Every time a user of the app does something within the app that calls on GPT, the creator of the app has to pay for it, correct? That’s because there’s a limited amount of “tokens”. So let’s say there’s 10,000 users of the app. There’s no way that isn’t super expensive right? Or am I missing something?

Hello, i have been developing a side project that utilizes openai gpt4o latest api for its vision capabilities.

I am trying to make a cost analysis, my api requests pretty consistent with around 34k input and 2k output however the charges i am having varies very different.

I should be paying about 10.3 cents per request however it changes between 13-20 cents per request.

What am i doing wrong here ? Thanks.

So i crunched some numbers today.

Im trying to make a chat gpt driven app, and i looked at what would happen if i scaled up. Im currently using $.02 daily, which is a fair estimate. Now, running those numbers up,

Hundreds (e.g., 100 users): Daily cost: 100 users * $0.02/user = $2

Monthly cost: $2/day * 30 days = $60

Annual cost: $60/month * 12 months = $720

Thousands (e.g., 1,000 users):

Daily cost: 1,000 users * $0.02/user = $20

Monthly cost: $20/day * 30 days = $600

Annual cost: $600/month * 12 months = $7,200

Tens of Thousands (e.g., 10,000 users):

Daily cost: 10,000 users * $0.02/user = $200

Monthly cost: $200/day * 30 days = $6,000

Annual cost: $6,000/month * 12 months = $72,000

How the hell can any startup afford this?? These prices feel exorbitant. And trust me, im trying to minmax my token usage as much as i can here, but it hurts when you get charged for tokens sent, returned, in chat history and system prompt.

Idk, whats yall’s opinion? Has anyone made a gpt app that didnt break the bank?

Edit: just woke up, ouch my karma

Edit 2: seeing alot of comments asking my business plan, im not trying to out myself here but generally speaking i expect the service to be something like the following:

-users would pay a one time fee to access the app for a period of time, typically a few months. Chats are also rate limited to 15/3 hours

There was one pretty helpful comment out there pointing out that simply charging users the equivalent of $.04 a day would solve alot of issues, and honestly I agree so shoutout to that guy wherever he is.

Apparently 70k is considered normal for VC funding, which is nuts to me. I ran a firebase app for a year with about 100 active users and spent $.12 on bandwidth, so the jump is jarring.

Im still standing by my statement. Lower level startups will get gate kept by this pricing, leaving only the giants to monopolize it. Our only hope is for PALM to have better pricing or wizardLM to catch up.

I'm trying to build a voice agent for a B2C and I never realized how expensive it is. I can get it's easy to be profitable for B2B agents since you reduce payroll(s), but I don't get how this could be profitable for B2C.

Do you charge per usage or just price it very expensive?

Basically the post. I'm surprised at the number of people paying for plus and not using any of the features beyond basic LLM stuff. It's so easy to get an API key and $20 of heavy usage would probably still go far.

That said, I use it from the shell, and was wondering if anyone knows of particularly good web interfaces where you can just plug your API key in. Or alternatively, if there is a local app for Mac or Windows that would be more secure.

I’m conceptualizing a SaaS that uses OpenAI’s models on the backend but am having trouble calculating potential cost of use. I understand there is a token model, but how many tokens are typically used in each request? I have ChatGPT Plus, for example - is there a way to see the value in tokens for my searches?

Hi all,

Would appreciate some clarity on my use case, as I'm not confident that it will be cost effective for me to use the API.

My plan is that perhaps somewhere around 30-50 times a day, I would be asking the API "Does this blurb of text contain this string, or something that looks like this string?" And I would only need to get back a "Yes" or "No".

The blurb of text could be anywhere from 20 to 500 characters or so.

How would I calculate this based on the pricing guide?

I've been building with the OpenAI API and the thing that's killing me isn't the cost itself - it's that I have zero idea what something will cost until after I've already spent the money.

Like I'll be building a feature that involves a few chained API calls with function calling, and I genuinely cannot tell you if that feature costs $0.02 or $2.00 per run until I've already run it a bunch of times. And by then I've already committed to the architecture.

Is anyone doing pre-flight cost estimation? Like before you send a prompt, getting a rough idea of what it'll actually cost? Input tokens are somewhat predictable but output is a total guess - especially with tool use and multi-turn agents where one task might be 3 calls or 30.

How are you all budgeting for this? Or is everyone just shipping and checking the dashboard the next morning?

Am I missing something? They think this is worth an order of magnitude more than Sonnet?

I have an idea for an MVP that utilizes OpenAI APIs for summarization. Users identify information that’s important to them, I use that as the basis for some inference API calls and transformation to a specific format, I keep track of stuff in a database, I provide reporting and gamification. I anticipate this could be used several times a day by power users. Pretty basic.

I’m trying to work through the usage and pricing scenarios. I’d love to offer a freemium model: limited free tier and a paid tier with more usage. But I’m bootstrapping and fear that OpenAI call costs will kill me. A metered approach feels less appealing from a consumer perspective.

Has anyone else struggled with how much to give away for free, how to charge enough for a paid tier, etc. when every call can cost $0.01/$0.03 for GPT4? (I guess I could try using GPT3.5Turbo or GPT4.0Turbo.) What have you come up with?