Cost Calculator
The same content costs more in high-fertility languages because it tokenizes into more tokens. See the real monthly bill — and the “multilingual tax” you pay vs. English. ● exact
Workload
Prices are approximate (2026) and editable.
Estimated monthly cost — Tamil on GPT-4 Turbo
$12,940
English-equivalent
$1,456
Multilingual tax
$11,484
vs English
8.9×
Same workload, every model — Tamil
Llama-3.1-8B (hosted)
$146
GPT-3.5 Turbo
$647
GPT-4o
$1,089
GPT-4 Turbo
$12,940
Cheapest for Tamil: Llama-3.1-8B (hosted) at $146/mo — largely because its tokenizer fragments Tamil less.