PDF Token & Cost Calculator
Estimate tokens and cost to process a PDF with an LLM.
With the default inputs, $0.0238 to process this PDF — 20 pages ≈ 15,000 tokens. Enter your own numbers below to recompute instantly; the full step-by-step math is shown under the worked example.
Results update automatically as you type.
- Estimated input tokens
- 15,000 tokens
- Input cost
- $0.0187
- Output cost
- $0.00500
- Total
- $0.0238
Estimate how many tokens a PDF becomes and what it costs to summarize or analyze it with an LLM. Enter page count and words per page to get input tokens and cost.
How this is calculated
We convert pages × words per page into text tokens (words × ~1.33), add your output tokens, and price both at your model's input and output rates. A dense ~500-word page is roughly 650–700 input tokens; scanned PDFs must be OCR'd to text first.
Is this a good result? What to do next
For a handful of pages the cost is trivial cents; the number matters when you process thousands of documents a month or use a premium model. If the total looks high, a cheaper model or summarizing page-by-page usually fixes it.
Typical planning ranges
- Dense page (~500 words)
- ~650–700 tokens
- 20-page report
- ~13k input tokens
- Output share
- set by your summary length
Ranges are typical planning figures to sanity-check your result, not authoritative benchmarks. Your numbers will vary with use case, volume, and vendor.
How to improve this number
- Use a cheaper model for extraction and a stronger one only if needed.
- Summarize per section instead of stuffing the whole PDF each call.
- Cache repeated instructions across documents.
Common mistakes
- Forgetting scanned PDFs need OCR before token counting.
- Ignoring output tokens for long summaries.
When to use a different approach
For scanned documents, add the OCR cost calculator. To check whether a long PDF fits in one call, use the 'will it fit' checker.
Worked example (defaults)
With the default inputs above, here is the result:
- Estimated input tokens
- 15,000 tokens
- Input cost
- $0.0187
- Output cost
- $0.00500
- Total
- $0.0238
- tokens ≈ 20 pages x 500 words x ~1.33
Sources & references
Frequently asked questions
How many tokens is a PDF page?+
A dense page of ~500 words is roughly 650-700 tokens of text. Scanned PDFs must be OCR'd first, which changes the estimate.
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