Cost calculator

OpenAI API direct vs UnlimitedVisitors

Calculate what you'd burn rolling your own AI content stack vs paying $149/mo flat.

Run the numbers Free · No signup · Runs in your browser
100
105001000
Roll your own/mo

OpenAI API + glue code

  • GPT-4o tokens$3
  • DALL-E 3 images$4
  • Dev time (20h @ $80/h)$1,600
Total$1,607
UnlimitedVisitors/mo · flat

Recommended plan

  • Plan tierPro $349/mo
  • Models, images, alt textincluded
  • CMS publishing, internal linksincluded
Total$349

You save

$1,258/mo · $15,095/yr

That's 4.6× cheaper, with zero infra to maintain.

See UV pricing

Pricing assumptions: GPT-4o input + output blended at ~$0.015 / 1K tokens (1.3 tokens per word), DALL-E 3 standard at $0.04 / image, dev time at $80/h with a 20h floor for orchestration, retries, prompt tuning and CMS plumbing. Real-world OpenAI bills are usually higher once you add embeddings, retries, evals and observability.

Honest questions

Why is the OpenAI cost so high?

It's not just the model bill — that's the cheap part. The expensive part is the dev time to wire orchestration, prompt versioning, retries, image generation, alt text, internal linking, schema markup, multilingual variants, and CMS publishing. We default to a 20h/mo floor for that, which is conservative.

Doesn't my dev team work for free?

Engineer hours have an opportunity cost even on salary — every hour spent on a content pipeline is an hour not shipping product. $80/h is a low blended rate; in most US/EU markets the true loaded cost is $120–$200/h.

What if I just use ChatGPT manually?

Then your cost per article is your own time, not API tokens. The math changes completely. UV is for teams that want to ship 50+ articles/month without copy-pasting prompts — if you publish 5 articles a quarter, ChatGPT Plus is the right answer.

Are these UV prices real?

Yes — see /#pricing. Tiers shown ($149 / $349 / $999) are the public flat-rate plans. They include image generation, alt text, internal linking, multilingual variants, schema markup and CMS publishing. No per-article overage at those volumes.