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CLCircuitLedgerIndependent tech reviews

AI Models tool

AI model cost calculator

Estimate monthly model cost and decide where routing rules are worth the setup time.

Fast answerA routing-first budget: premium model only for hard prompts, utility model for routine work, and an eval budget for the prompts that decide spend.
Inputs

What to collect

Monthly requestsSeparate support, extraction, coding, analysis, and agent prompts instead of blending them.
Average tokensInclude retries and tool-call context, not just the happy-path prompt.
Hard-task shareMark the percentage that truly needs the best reasoning model.
Method

How to use it

1Group prompts by risk and difficulty.
2Price each group on solved-task cost, including retries.
3Route routine work away from premium models unless quality loss creates rework.
Output

How to read the result

Default pathUtility modelMost summaries, labels, extraction, and drafts should start here.
Escalation pathFrontier reasoningUse only when missed constraints or bad code would cost more than latency.
Control pathMonthly eval sampleKeep a recurring test set so price cuts or model updates do not silently change quality.
Thresholds

Useful vs risky

HealthyPremium requests stay under 25% of volume unless the product is mostly expert work.
RiskyOne model is the default for every prompt and nobody tracks retries.

Buyer tools

Quick checks before a shortlist

All 20 tools
AI Modelsai model cost calculator

AI model cost calculator

Use this before choosing a default model. The useful answer is not the cheapest token price; it is the cheapest solved task with acceptable latency and failure rate.

Founder, product lead, or engineering manager forecasting API spend before launch.
AI Modelsllm context window planner

LLM context window planner

Long context helps only when the model still follows instructions near the end of the prompt. This planner forces a fit check before a bigger context tier becomes the easy answer.

Team deciding whether long-context models, RAG, or smaller prompts fit a product workflow.
AI Modelsprompt routing savings estimator

Prompt routing savings estimator

Routing is useful when easy prompts are common and failure is observable. It is wasteful when every task is rare, expert, or hard to classify.

AI product owner trying to reduce spend without lowering output quality.
AI Modelsinference latency budget planner

Inference latency budget planner

A fast model can still feel slow if retrieval, tool calls, retries, and post-processing are not budgeted. This planner keeps the whole user path visible.

Product and infrastructure team designing an AI feature with strict response-time expectations.
AI Modelsmodel eval sample size planner

Model eval sample size planner

Small evals can still be useful if they are realistic and repeated. This tool makes the sample deliberate: enough cases to catch regression, not so many that no one maintains it.

Engineering team comparing models for code, research, support, extraction, or agents.
AI Toolsrag chunk size planner

RAG chunk size planner

Chunking is not a magic number. The right size depends on the shape of the source and whether the model needs local detail, full sections, or cross-document synthesis.

Builder designing retrieval for docs, support content, transcripts, policies, or code knowledge.
AI Toolsembedding storage cost estimator

Embedding storage cost estimator

Embedding cost is rarely just the first import. Refresh cycles, duplicate content, metadata, backups, and permission filters decide whether the system stays manageable.

Team sizing vector storage before importing docs, tickets, transcripts, or customer knowledge.
AI Toolsapi rate limit planner

API rate limit planner

Rate limits are product constraints. This planner helps choose batching, backoff, queueing, and multi-model fallback before launch traffic teaches the lesson.

Developer preparing production AI traffic across models, vendors, or internal apps.