Whether you've never written code or ship to production daily: AgentCost tells you which AI model or agent fits your idea, what it really costs, and what other builders are using right now.
Tell us what you want to build, how much you code and your budget. You'll get a step-by-step plan with the exact tools and the model to use.
Step 1 of 3
What are you building?
AI 101
New to AI? Six words that explain everything here
No jargon. Read this once and every page on AgentCost will make sense.
AI model
The “brain”. You send it text (or images, audio) and it sends back an answer. GPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek are model families.
“Summarize this email” → a summary.
AI agent
A model plus tools and a loop: it plans, takes actions (edit files, browse, call APIs), checks results and keeps going until the task is done.
“Add a login page” → it writes code, runs it, fixes errors.
API
How your app talks to a model. You pay per use instead of a monthly seat, which is why your volume decides the bill.
Your support page sends each question to the model's API.
Tokens
The unit models are billed in — roughly ¾ of a word. Prices are “per 1M tokens”, with input (what you send) and output (what it writes) priced separately.
A 750-word article ≈ 1,000 tokens.
Context window
How much the model can read at once — its short-term memory. Bigger windows fit whole codebases or long documents in one request.
1M tokens ≈ several novels at once.
Benchmark
A standardized test that scores models on the same tasks, so you can compare quality fairly instead of trusting marketing.
Coding Index: how well a model solves real coding tasks.
Model or agent? The quick rule
You want an answer, text or a classification
→ A model
Call its API, or chat with it
You want a task done end-to-end
→ An agent
Use a ready agent or build one with a framework
You don't code and want a working app
→ An app-builder agent
Describe it, iterate by chatting
You want to cut cost
→ A smaller model
Use the “Best value” sort and test on real data
Compare AI models
Every model, ranked for your use case
Pick a use case, set your volume, and compare quality against what you'll actually pay.
What are you building?
Build software
Create media
Run in production
Estimate your monthly bill
Every token-priced card shows its cost for this workload.
Our picks
Based on Artificial Analysis scores and your workload estimate
Our flagship reasoning model, built for complex software engineering, deep mathematical and scientific problem solving, autonomous multi-step agents, and long-decode generation up to 1M tokens.
Gemini Robotics ER 2, short for Gemini Robotics Embodied Reasoning 2, is a vision-language model endpoint that enables robots to understand their environments precisely, supporting agentic orchestration of robots, video progress understanding, multi-robot collaboration, and advanced spatial reasoning.
Gemini Robotics ER 2 Streaming is a vision-language model endpoint for robotics optimized for real-time text streaming using the Live API. It accepts text, image, video, and audio input and supports bidirectional streaming with function calling.
Our low-latency, audio-to-audio models optimized for real-time voice agents and live dialogue, including background reasoning support with Extended Thinking.
Models answer; agents get things done. Plans and prices are read live from each tool's pricing page, popularity from GitHub and real usage — click any tool for the full breakdown.
AI app builders
No coding needed
Describe it, get a working app
You type what you want (“a booking site for my salon”) and the agent writes the code, shows a live preview and can publish it. You refine it by chatting.
Best for: Non-coders, founders validating an idea, quick MVPs and landing pages.
Visual workflows (“when an email arrives, summarize it with AI and post to Slack”). You drag blocks instead of writing code, and plug an AI model into any step.
Best for: Business owners and teams automating repetitive tasks across tools they already use.
A code editor with AI built in: it completes your code, explains errors and can make multi-file changes when you ask. You stay in control of every change.
Best for: People learning to code and developers who want speed without giving up control.
Agents that read your whole project, plan, edit many files, run tests and fix failures on their own — usually from the terminal. You review what they did, like a teammate’s pull request.
Best for: Developers shipping features, refactors and bug fixes faster.
Code libraries for building agents yourself: you pick a model, give it tools (search, your database, your APIs) and the framework runs the reasoning loop.
Best for: Developers adding AI assistants, copilots or automated workflows to their own app.
Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads your entire codebase, plans and executes changes across files, runs tests, and iterates on failures, all from natural language prompts.
Hermes Agent is an open-source, self-improving AI agent by Nous Research that runs persistently with memory across sessions, and builds reusable skills from experience. It comes with 40+ built-in tools, including web search, browser automation, and vision, plus scheduled automations and subagents.
Straight from each provider's official pricing page, re-checked every few hours. Every model's “All prices” panel links the exact page it came from. If a page changes and our reader breaks, we keep showing the last verified prices and mark the provider below.
Where do the scores come from?+
We don't run benchmarks and never make up numbers. Intelligence, Coding and Agentic scores are Artificial Analysis's independent indexes; web and UI design scores are Design Arena's crowd-voted Elo ratings; “most used” ranks are real token volume from OpenRouter. Each is linked below.
How are “Our picks” chosen?+
From the models currently in view: the top performer has the highest score on the benchmark that fits your use case; best value has the most score per dollar among above-median models; the budget pick is the cheapest model that still scores above the median. Change filters or your workload and the picks update.
What do Frontier, Balanced and Efficient mean?+
A model's position in its own provider's lineup, read from the model family (Opus/Sonnet/Haiku, Pro/Flash/Lite, -mini…) and its price. It's a quick orientation aid — for actual quality, use the benchmark scores.
How is the monthly cost estimated?+
Your monthly input and output tokens × the model's per-million-token prices, with the cached share of input charged at the cache-read rate. It excludes tool fees, search grounding, images and taxes — always confirm on the provider's page before committing budget.
Is AgentCost affiliated with any AI provider?+
No. It's independent and free to use. No provider pays for placement or rankings.
Every testimonial is verified by hand before it's published.
Reach the developer
Built by one developer. Every message gets read.
Spotted a wrong price, want a provider added, or have an idea that would make this more useful for your team? Partnerships and collaborations are welcome too.
AgentCost just launched. If it helped you pick a model or cut your AI bill, tell other builders — your words will be the first thing the next visitor reads.