What Does AI Chat Really Cost? The Cost Calculator Explained
Two questions often get mixed up when it comes to cost: what does Personarium cost, and what does AI chat cost? The honest answer: those are two separate bills, and we only issue one of them.
Two separate bills
You pay model costs directly to the provider — OpenRouter for text, optionally fal.ai for images and read-aloud. Personarium adds nothing on top and never sees a cent of it. The Personarium membership (€4.99 a month) is entirely separate: it covers the Hub, curation, and updates, not your AI usage.
What the model price depends on
The biggest lever is which model you pick: cheap, fast models cost a fraction per message compared to large premium models. On top of that comes how long your messages and replies are, and how often you chat. We deliberately don't list fixed cent amounts on this page — individual provider prices change too often to state them reliably here. Instead we group models into "Budget," "Standard," and "Premium."
How the cost calculator works
On the cost calculator page, you pick a model from the three price tiers and use a slider to set how many messages a day you estimate. The calculation assumes a typical message length and scales it up to a month — using actual current model prices, not numbers frozen into the code. The last-updated date sits right next to the result.
Keeping an eye on your balance
Personarium shows your OpenRouter balance right in the app and warns you when it's running low. Topping up happens directly at the provider, never through us. How far a given balance stretches depends heavily on the model — a few euros often last several weeks on a cheap model, considerably less on a premium one. The cost calculator gives you an honest first number for that.
Model costs go to the provider, not to us — the membership covers something else.