Show HN: CostPerPrompt – Live AI API pricing and real-workload cost calculators

A shiny new CostPerPrompt tool has arrived with a big promise: stop guessing what artificial intelligence will cost and finally see the damage before your monthly bill does. The site tracks live prices for 232+ AI models and offers calculators for chatbots, voice bots, search helpers, and those buzzy "agents" that can quietly burn through money while smiling. It even tries to factor in discounts from repeated prompts and slower bulk jobs, which is exactly the kind of detail founders obsess over at 2 a.m.

But on Hacker News, the real action was in the peanut gallery. One camp basically said, "cute spreadsheet, but where’s the real math?" User esafak argued that raw price lists are only half the story, because cheaper models can still cost more if they need more words, more retries, or more thinking to do the same job. In other words: bargain-bin AI can become luxury AI real fast.

Then came the practical worriers. Cortesoft zeroed in on the messiest part: caching, or when systems remember repeated text so you pay less. Great in theory, but what if you go make coffee for 20 minutes and the memory vanishes? Suddenly your "cheap" chatbot is back to running up the tab. That sparked the thread’s core debate: can any calculator really predict the chaos of real human behavior?

And because no launch is complete without drama, one commenter accused the creator of sounding like an AI bot replying to comments, while another delivered the bluntest review possible: "My brain cannot process these AI generated websites anymore" before allegedly smashing the back button in under a second. So yes, the site is about AI costs — but the comments were about trust, fatigue, and whether the internet has finally had enough of glossy robot calculators.