Cardwave

Chat turn budget calculator

Chat costs grow as a conversation lengthens, because every turn resends the history so far. Enter a model's per-token prices and your typical turn sizes to see how many turns a budget buys, and where the context window caps the cost.

A turn here means one user message plus the one AI response to it.

Metrics

Max turns
Final cost
Window capping point
Cost of first turn
Cost of capped turn
Sliding window: the system prompt is a fixed baseline cost on every turn. Once history fills the remaining context window, the input size stops growing and turn costs flatten out.