Knowing what an answer costs before and after you send it
Knowing what an answer costs before and after you send it Knowing what an answer costs before and after you send it Bike4Mind Engineering ยท October 13, 2026 A chat assistant that bills by usage has an obvious problem: the number that matters, what this answer cost you, is the one you usually learn about last. Over the past few weeks we shipped a set of changes in Bike4Mind so that the cost of a message is visible before you send it, right after it arrives, and in aggregate on your balance. This post covers what you will see in the app, and then how the numbers are produced in the open-source core. Before you send: credits per 1M tokens in the model picker The model picker already marked each model with a rough cost tier (lower, medium, premium). That told you which model was relatively expensive but not what a message would cost. The tooltip on the cost icon now adds the model's rate in credits per 1M input tokens and per 1M output tokens, at the model's base pricing tier. It uses the same unit as the pricing table under Profile > Usage and the models API, so the three places agree to the last digit. A few edge cases are handled on purpose. A model marked free to run shows 0 credits rather than a tier label. A model with no usable price, and image models, keep the tier-only text, so "unpriced" never reads as "free". The tooltip also closes when you tap elsewhere on a touch screen. One caveat the code itself states: the figure is the list rate. Prompt caching can make a rea...
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