# Cost estimate — Cloudflare Workers AI, Sep 2026

All figures from `node scripts/cost.js` (pricing per 1M tokens from
`scripts/models.js`, sourced from Cloudflare's published Workers AI pricing).
Workers AI bills at $0.011/1,000 Neurons; the free allocation is 10,000 Neurons/day
(~$0.11/day) — negligible at these scales. Frontier models (glm-5.x, kimi, deepseek-v4)
require a paid billing method or AI Gateway credits.

## Interview budget (standard depth)

~73 cells × ~6 turns ≈ **1.0M input / 0.4M base output tokens per model**; reasoning
models inflate output ×2–3 (chain-of-thought is billed output).

## Pilot (5 models: llama-3.1-8b-fp8, qwen3-30b-a3b-fp8, gemma-4-26b, gpt-oss-120b, glm-5.3)

```
@cf/meta/llama-3.1-8b-instruct-fp8      $0.267
@cf/qwen/qwen3-30b-a3b-fp8              $0.319
@cf/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it           $0.220
@cf/openai/gpt-oss-120b                 $0.950
@cf/zai-org/glm-5.3                     $3.16   [paid billing]
PILOT TOTAL                             $4.92
```

glm-5.3 dominates the pilot: 1.4/4.4 $/M in/out. Dropping it to glm-5.3-flash (0.15/0.5)
cuts the pilot to ~$1.75; using prompt caching (cached input 0.26 vs 1.4 $/M) reduces
glm-5.3 further if sessions hit the cache.

## Full catalogue sweep (26 text-gen models, standard depth)

**Total ≈ $37.78** (run `node scripts/cost.js --all` for the live per-model table).

- Cheap tier ($0.02–0.35/model): granite micro, llama 1B/3B/8B-fp8, qwen3-30b-a3b, gemma-4-26b, glm-4.7-flash
- Mid tier ($0.35–1.20/model): gpt-oss-20b/120b, llama-4-scout, mistral-small, sea-lion, nemotron, qwen2.5-coder, llama-3.3-70b, glm-5.3-flash, deepseek-v4-flash
- High tier ($1.30–5.40/model): qwen3.8-27b, qwq-32b, deepseek-r1-distill (worst value: 0.497/4.881 $/M with ×3 reasoning output ≈ $5.38), kimi-k2.6/k2.7-code, deepseek-v4-pro, glm-5.2/5.3

## Sensitivity

| Scenario | Cost |
| --- | --- |
| Minimal depth (8 domains × 2 lenses + self-model) | ~$11 total sweep |
| Standard depth (baseline) | ~$38 total sweep |
| Deep depth (all 6 lenses × all 24 domains, per cell count ×2.5) | ~$95 total sweep |
| Standard depth, 2× verbosity headroom | ~$75 total sweep |

Practical ceiling for the entire catalogue at any sane depth: **well under $100**.
Re-eliciting the whole catalogue annually (to measure fleet drift): same numbers again.