A million tokens, measured in
Chat is tiny per message and huge in aggregate: a million tokens is about 75,000 messages — six years of daily texting fed into a model in one go.
1 block = 25 messages
≈ 75,000 chat messages
chat messages
A typical text message is about 10 words (~13 tokens). A million tokens is over six years of texting at 30 messages a day.
basis: ~13 tokens per message
Conversational AI accumulates tokens silently. Each message in a thread adds to the running total, and a long conversation can easily consume more tokens than a short document. For chatbot builders, the critical constraint is not just "how many messages fit" but how to manage conversation history — when to summarize, when to truncate, and how to keep context relevant without exceeding model limits.
Everything on this page is exactly one million tokens. So the price of having a model read — or write — all of it is simply each model's per-million rate. Updated 2026-10-02.
| Model | Read all of it (input) | Write all of it (output) |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-6 Astra | $10 | $50 |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $10 | $50 |
| Claude Opus 5 | $5 | $25 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 | $20 |
| GPT-6 Sol | $2 | $10 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | $2 | $12 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2 | $10 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1 | $5 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 | $3.75 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | $0.30 | $2.50 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.10 | $0.50 |
From $0.10 to $50 for the same million tokens. Try your own budget in the calculator →
Or start over with the full picture — scale, prices, and the budget calculator.