All learning paths Learn See Try Make Count what each answer costs What this lesson is about Work out the cost of one answer, then of a thousand. Decide the price before anyone uses it.
Your tool writes replies for a small shop. The owner asks what a month will cost him. What do you work out first?
A What two other people charge for the same job, and sit just under them. B The cost of a normal day, multiplied by thirty. C Work out the cost of one answer, then of a thousand, then of a bad month.
Check my recall Why this matters The people who sell model answers bill you for what you use, after a small free amount. The bill counts the tokens that went in and the tokens that came back, each at a published price. So the cost of one answer is a number you can work out.
Work out what one answer costs, then a thousand, and set the price or free limit before launch.
The people who sell model answers bill you for what you use, after a small free amount. The bill counts the tokens that went in and the tokens that came back, each at a published price. So the cost of one answer is a number you can work out.
Work out the cost of one answer, then of a thousand, then of a bad month. Count the retries, the long inputs, and the answers nobody ever reads. Decide the price, or the free limit, before anybody uses it. Task You are pricing a tool that writes replies for a small shop, with the model's price page open.
Weak approach Times one clean answer, calls it cheap, and multiplies by a thousand to name a monthly price. The token counts are never read, so the figure is a guess with a rupee sign on it.
Stronger approach Reads the same price page on 13 September 2026: Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, $0.10 per million tokens in and $0.40 out. One reply is 2,000 in and 500 out, which is ₹0.035 at ₹88 to the dollar. Two hundred replies a day is about ₹7. The retries, the long pasted messages and the replies nobody opens go on top of that.
Why the stronger approach works The weak sheet prices the best day and never opens the price page. The strong one shows the multiplication and the day the price was read, because that page changes.
Try a changed situation Your cousin is pricing a photocopy service outside a college gate for the exam season. Which rule still applies?
Make something yourself Work out what one answer from your tool costs, then a thousand, then a bad month. Write the ceiling you will not cross, and the price or free limit you set.
Lesson 5 of 7 on Small AI products for Bharat next Decide what happens when it fails Part 2 ends in a work sample you can send
Read the primary or official source: Hugging Face · Inference Providers pricing