Free tool · AI Cost Control
What will AI actually cost you?
Find out before your CFO does.
Estimate your Azure OpenAI bill in ten seconds: pick a model, enter your traffic, and see the monthly and annual number — plus what the same workload costs on a small model. Indicative, free, and nothing is collected.
- Jul 2026 list prices
- Frontier vs small model comparison
- PTU break-even hint
Indicative estimate from Azure OpenAI list prices (Jul 2026, converted at $1 = £0.80) for standard pay-as-you-go deployments. Actual bills vary with region, caching, batching and negotiated pricing — always check the current Azure pricing page. This tool stores nothing and sends nothing.
The numbers behind the numbers.
How much does Azure OpenAI cost to run?+
It depends on model choice, tokens per request and traffic. As an indicative example: 2,000 requests a day at 1,500 input and 500 output tokens on GPT-4.1 is roughly £340 a month at Jul 2026 list prices — while the same traffic on GPT-4o mini is under £30. Model selection is the single biggest cost lever.
When is provisioned throughput (PTU) cheaper than pay-as-you-go?+
PTU starts to pay when you have sustained, predictable traffic — typically once a workload's pay-as-you-go bill reaches the low thousands of pounds per month. Below that, pay-as-you-go is usually right. The break-even depends on utilisation, which is what a proper cost audit models.
Why did my Azure AI bill jump unexpectedly?+
The usual causes are prompt growth (context creeping upwards), retry storms, an agent loop calling models more than intended, or traffic quietly moving to a more expensive model. Cost-anomaly detection catches these within days instead of at invoice time.
Is this calculator accurate?+
It is an indicative estimate from Azure OpenAI list prices at Jul 2026, converted to GBP. Real bills vary with region, caching, batching and negotiated discounts. Treat it as the conversation-starter number — the AI Cost Audit produces the real one from your actual usage.