Online Tool Store
Fine-Tune Cost Estimator
Estimate fine-tuning cost from dataset size, token counts, and epochs, using rates you enter from your provider's own pricing page.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.
Finance
Fine-Tune Cost Estimator
Frontend preview — no upload or external service.
Cost estimate
4,000 examples at 850 tokens over 3 epochs is 10.2M training tokens. At a rate of 8.00 per million that is about 82.00 for the run, before any inference costs.
How the Fine-Tune Cost Estimator works
- Count your training examples and their average token length — token count, not word count.
- Set the number of epochs; cost scales linearly with it.
- Enter the current rate from your provider's published pricing, since rates change and vary by model.
The method
Training cost is driven by total tokens processed, which is the dataset size multiplied by the number of passes over it.
total training tokens = examples × average tokens × epochs
4,000 examples at 850 tokens is 3.4M tokens per epoch, so three epochs processes 10.2M — and doubling epochs doubles the bill.
FAQ
Why does it ask me for the rate?
Because provider pricing changes and differs by model, and a figure hard-coded into a calculator goes stale quietly. Take the current number from the provider's own pricing page.
How many epochs do I need?
Fewer than people expect. More epochs increase cost linearly and risk overfitting on a small dataset. Start low, evaluate, and add only if the evaluation says to.
Is fine-tuning the right approach at all?
Often not. Better prompting, few-shot examples, or retrieval over your own documents solve many problems that look like fine-tuning problems, at a fraction of the cost and with no training run to repeat.
How we compare
| Feature | Online Tool Store | A spreadsheet | An advisor consultation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uses current rates you supply | ✓ | Manual | Provider's own |
| Epoch cost scaling shown | ✓ | Manual | ✓ |
| Provider-neutral | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Nothing transmitted | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Fine-Tune Cost Estimator asks for the rate rather than hard-coding one, because published pricing moves and a stale figure in a calculator is worse than none.