LLM Token Budget Monthly 2027 Calculator
Plan your team\'s monthly LLM token budget — input and output tokens per million requests across the major frontier models. Build a defensible 2027 AI budget by use case (chat assistants, RAG, agents, content) instead of guessing a flat dollar figure.
Why a Token Budget Beats a Dollar Budget
Token prices dropped 80 percent between 2023 and 2025 and are forecast to drop another 40-60 percent through 2027 (a16z, Sequoia). A dollar budget locks you into stale assumptions. A token budget — by team, by use case — lets you forecast cost regardless of which model wins next quarter. You set the volume; the cost flexes with the market.
Token Budget Formula
Monthly Cost = (Input Tokens × Input Price + Output Tokens × Output Price) / 1,000,000
Use millions-of-tokens as the unit of currency for planning.
Typical Token Volumes by Use Case
Reference volumes per month per team (10-30 person team): customer support chatbot 50-300M input / 20-150M output, RAG copilot 100-800M input / 30-200M output, autonomous coding agent 200M-2B input / 100M-1B output, content generation 20-100M input / 30-150M output, eval-as-judge 10-80M input / 5-30M output. Agents are the runaway cost because each user turn triggers many internal model calls.
The Reserved Pricing Trap
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all offer committed-use discounts (typically 20-50 percent off list) for one to three year contracts. Sign these only after six months of stable volume data — early-stage AI products see volume swing 5-10x as features ship or get cut. Lock in too early and you pay for ghost capacity. Use the calculator to model worst case (10 percent under commit) vs best case (3x over commit, no discount on overage).
How to Defend the Budget to Finance
Tie token volume to a leading business metric (MAU, deals closed, tickets resolved). Show cost per business unit (USD per MAU, USD per resolved ticket) rather than total spend. This converts a scary 600 percent year-over-year token line item into a clearly improving USD/user metric. Finance will fund growing AI spend if the per-unit economics are improving.
Sources: OpenAI Pricing 2026, Anthropic Pricing 2026, Google AI Studio Pricing 2026, a16z LLM Pricing Trends 2026. Last updated: April 2026.