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LLM API Cost Calculator — India 2026

Calculate your monthly AI API spend in Indian Rupees (₹). Compare GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, Gemini, Mistral, Groq and more — with live INR conversion and India-specific GST guidance.

Your Usage
≈ 375 words in English
≈ 225 words in English
Input Price
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per million tokens
Output Price
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per million tokens
GST note for India: Add 18% GST (reverse charge mechanism) for Indian businesses importing foreign cloud API services. This calculator shows pre-GST costs.
Your Cost Estimate
Cost Per Request
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USD
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INR
Monthly Cost
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USD
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INR
Annual Cost
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USD
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INR
Monthly Token Breakdown
Total input tokens —
Input cost —
Total output tokens —
Output cost —
With 18% GST (INR) —

Pricing as of Q1 2026. Verify at provider pricing pages before budgeting.

All Models — India Price Comparison 2026

Monthly ₹ cost for 10,000 requests × 500 input × 300 output tokens at ₹85/USD. Click any column header to sort.

Provider ↕ Model ↕ Input $/M ↕ Output $/M ↕ Monthly ₹ ↕ Monthly $ ↕

Prices exclude GST. Based on workload inputs above — adjust the calculator to update this table.

Cost Optimisation Tips for Indian Teams

Route by Complexity

Route simple queries to GPT-4o mini or Gemini Flash. Reserve Sonnet and GPT-4o for hard reasoning tasks. A tiered approach typically cuts costs 60–80%.

Cache Repeated Prompts

Anthropic offers prompt caching at a 90% discount on cached input tokens. OpenAI has similar for GPT-4o. Cache system prompts and shared context that repeats across requests.

Trim Your Context Window

Every token costs money. Summarise conversation history instead of passing full logs. Removing 500 tokens per request × 100K requests/month saves roughly ₹2,125/month on GPT-4o.

Budget 18% GST from Day 1

Indian businesses pay 18% GST on foreign API imports (RCM). A ₹50,000/month API bill becomes ₹59,000 with GST. This is often missed in early-stage unit economics — factor it in early.

Frequently Asked Questions

The most affordable options are Google Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B (~₹3.19/M input tokens), Llama 3.1 8B via Groq (~₹4.25/M), and Mistral 7B (~₹4.25/M). For production-grade quality, Gemini 1.5 Flash (~₹6.38/M input) and Claude 3.5 Haiku (~₹68/M input) offer strong value. GPT-4o mini is the go-to for teams preferring OpenAI infrastructure.

GPT-4o costs $2.50/M input tokens and $10.00/M output tokens. For 100,000 requests/month with 500 input and 500 output tokens each, that's approximately ₹53,125/month at ₹85/USD — or ₹62,688 including 18% GST. GPT-4o mini handles the same workload for ~₹3,188/month (pre-GST). Use the calculator above to tailor this to your exact numbers.

Yes. Indian businesses importing cloud API services from foreign providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) are subject to 18% GST under the Reverse Charge Mechanism (RCM). The Indian entity self-assesses and pays this GST — the foreign provider does not collect it. A $100 API bill becomes ~₹9,912 at ₹85/USD including GST. Consult your CA for specifics on input tax credit eligibility.

English uses ~1 token per 0.75 words. Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and other Indic scripts typically use 2–4× more tokens per word than English because most LLM tokenisers have limited Indic vocabulary. For Indic language workloads, multiply your token estimates by 2× as a conservative buffer and test with actual prompts using each provider's tokeniser tool. Gemini models have the most improved Indic tokenisation among current providers.

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