I’m no pricing authority. The rates here come live from OpenRouter, and the real source of truth is whatever your provider invoices. But when a team asks “what will AI cost us a month?”, here’s how I ballpark it. It’s less a magic number than knowing which levers move the bill.

The levers, roughly in order of impact

• Workload pattern. Agentic coding, a chat side-panel, and autocomplete differ by 10x or more. Settle this first.
• Context per call, mostly your codebase. Agents resend the accumulated context every turn, so a big monorepo costs far more per task than a small service.
• Your custom instructions. System prompts and rules files (CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules) ride along on every call. They’re the best thing to cache, and worth measuring.
• Turns per task. One “fix the failing tests” can fan out into a dozen calls. Output runs about 5x input, so verbosity hurts.
• Caching and model mix. Cached context bills at roughly 10%. Reserving the flagship for hard problems and routing the rest to a cheap model swings the total five to ten times.
• Real adoption, not headcount. Active days matter more than seats. Anthropic’s Claude Code averages about $6 per developer per active day.

Then measure, don’t guess. Paste real prompts through a tokenizer, or route a week of real traffic through a gateway and read the actual spend.

A rough estimator

Pick a workload and team size for a range in seconds. It’s a starting point, not a quote. For exact prices, defer to OpenRouter. For a real number, route a week of traffic through it and read the usage dashboard. Measured beats modeled.

The lineup is dynamic: the table shows the top three Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google models by real usage on OpenRouter, priced live, so it stays current on its own as new models ship. If that lookup is down it falls back to the newest models per provider, then to a small curated list. Local token counts are approximate, and cache-write, tool, and volume-discount costs are excluded. Cheapest isn’t best, so match the model to the job, then size the bill.