Why you can trust these numbers
CalcSays exists because most AI cost calculators show the naive number — list price × volume — and real bills don't work that way. Every tool here models the mechanism that makes the real number different (context accumulation, caching, retries, hidden reasoning, price cliffs), and every claim below is a design rule the codebase enforces, not marketing.
01Every number comes from a tested, deterministic engine
Each calculator is a pure function: the same inputs always produce the same outputs, computed live in your browser. Each engine ships with a test suite asserting its identities — decomposition rows must sum to the total, break-even points must satisfy their defining equation, caching savings must equal the cached-vs-uncached difference exactly. On every change, a stress test renders every page on this site and re-checks those invariants.
02AI never does the math
No number on this site is generated by a language model. The one place AI appears — the paid audit report — it only narrates figures the engines already computed: every dollar amount it writes is checked against the engine output by code, and anything it cannot quote verbatim (or as a code-verified sum of engine figures) is flagged as unverified, visibly.
03Two kinds of prices, both dated
Model API prices sync daily from OpenRouter (315 models; snapshot 2026-07-13). Prices OpenRouter doesn't carry — image generation, GPU rental, fine-tuning, subscriptions, embeddings, audio, video — are hand-verified against the providers' official pricing pages, and each of those calculators states its verification date. Providers that publish only opaque credit bundles are excluded rather than guessed.
04Estimates are labeled as estimates
Where a real quantity has no published number — framework token overhead, typical retry rates, tokens per video iteration — the calculator says "our estimate" and shows the assumption as an input you can change, instead of hiding it inside the result. Token counts are shown as honest ranges because every provider tokenizes differently.
05Nothing you type leaves your browser
The calculators run entirely client-side: no accounts, no email walls, nothing uploaded. The token estimator never transmits your pasted text — only the resulting count travels between pages. The paid report sends your slider values and the product description you choose to write, generates the report, and stores neither.
06The paid report carries a guarantee
The $99 stack audit must identify savings worth at least 10× its price over a year, or you reply to your receipt for a full refund. We can offer that because the savings levers are full engine recomputes of your exact stack — not percentage guesses.
What this site deliberately does not do
- No "AI replaces employees" ROI math — there is no defensible public baseline for it, so we don't pretend there is.
- No enterprise contract pricing — negotiated discounts aren't public, so the calculators model list-price APIs only.
- No numbers from memory, ours or a model's — if a price can't be traced to a source and a date, it doesn't ship.
Found a price that drifted from a provider's page, or math you can't reproduce? Email forrest@qqai.ai — a verifiable correction ships the same week.