What does it cost?

With your own API key (the secret password that lets GrannyBakes use your OpenAI account), you pay OpenAI directly for what you bake. There's no subscription in between: a short email often costs less than a tenth of a cent. This lesson shows how to read prices and turn them into "what does one message cost me?".

Prices per million tokens

Providers list prices per million tokens (tokens are the small bites AI reads and writes). A price card might say "$0.40 in, $1.60 out". That means:

• reading 1,000,000 tokens of your text costs $0.40,
• writing 1,000,000 tokens of answers costs $1.60.

A million tokens is about 750,000 words, roughly ten thick novels. You rarely get anywhere near that.

From prices to one message

Granny's estimates count a typical message as about 1,000 tokens in (your message, the instructions and some chat) and 500 out. At the prices above that is 0.001 × $0.40 + 0.0005 × $1.60, so about $0.0012: around a tenth of a cent. Every answer in GrannyBakes shows its real cost, so you never have to work it out by hand.

Try the calculator

Pick an oven and move the slider to see what a day and a month of baking would cost:

Pictures are priced differently

Picture ovens charge per picture, by size and quality, plus a tiny bit for your prompt. A medium picture usually costs a few cents, so pictures are by far the priciest thing you can bake.

Your grocery bill

OpenAI doesn't tell apps how much credit you have left. So GrannyBakes keeps a grocery bill on Keys & SpendKeys & Spend: enter what's on your OpenAI billing page once, and Granny subtracts every bake from it. That's an estimated balance: close, but check OpenAI's page now and then.

Granny's rule of thumb: the cost under each answer is the truth. Check it after your first few bakes and you'll quickly know what "normal" looks like.