How much does an AI-written article for a website really cost?
An AI model writes the text of an article for a few rubles. The full price comes from your hours spent checking facts and from articles nobody ever sees. At token prices, our post cost $18.56, because the model also reads sources and drafts. Start with one article: time the fact-check and multiply it by the price of your hour.
Roman Kaufman, founder of Kaufman Lab · Data as of: September 2026
In summer 2026, our content factory wrote posts for two channels on Dzen (a Russian blogging platform). At the factory, four AI assistants take turns: they collect facts, write, approve the text and draw an image. One run produced several posts. In one run, a post cost $3.67. In another, it cost $97.93.
We found the reason only when we looked at what else the factory did in the expensive runs.
Only the text the model outputs costs a few rubles
The most detailed Russian calculation of AI text prices is on Habr (a Russian tech community site), in a guide to AI tools for writing, updated in September 2026. It prices a 10,000-character article only by the finished text the model produced. You pay for tokens, which are small pieces of words. That comes to 2.25–4.7 rubles (about 3–6 US cents at the Bank of Russia rate of 85.46 rubles per dollar on September 10, 2026) with one model and 16.9–23.6 rubles (about 20–28 cents) with another. The calculation leaves out searching for sources, drafts and rewrites.
While writing a post, our factory read rules, facts and its own drafts. Sixteen runs produced 92 posts, at $18.56 per post. Almost all tokens went to reading things again. The text itself took a tiny share.
The dollars here are notional: this is the token price from the public price list. We actually paid with a subscription. Also, a Dzen post is shorter than a website article.
The Habr calculation is only correct if the model writes everything in one go. When it searches, reads and rewrites, you pay for that too.
Almost all of our factory's money went to work around the text
In the run where a post cost $97.93, the factory wrote only two posts, because it was a test run after its own fixes. Of all the project's money, less than a quarter went to runs that produced posts. Almost half went to setup, meaning fixing and improving the factory itself.
You should divide the money by what actually reached people. 121 topics went through the factory, and 71 posts were published. If you divide the project's total of $7,452 by 71 published posts, you get about $105 per post, more than five times $18.56.
On August 16, output stopped, even though the factory worked fine. A person published the posts by hand, and everything depended on that person's time. We stopped output ourselves, because production cost both hours and tokens. No counter measured how many minutes it took to approve one post.
Your article gets more expensive at fact-checking and at zero views
Fact-checking eats your hours, even though it is usually not counted in the price of an article. Since June 2025, the commercial terms of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, have said that you should not rely on facts from the model's answers without independent checking. An outdated number is easy to miss: an article on vc.ru (a Russian business media site) says that the model that is cheaper by price list ends up more expensive in 21.8% of comparisons. That number is from the first version of a research paper. The current version says 32%.
The second cost comes after publishing. On July 28, 2026, we collected the views of 39 posts. The best one got 18,266, the worst ones got almost zero, even though the factory kept text quality steady. The topic decided the reach, and for a post with no views, the cost per reader is infinite.
Calculate the cost of your article from your first publication
Our post cost $18.56 while we counted only the runs with posts, and $105 when we divided all the money by published posts. Your article will also cost more once you add up drafts and rewrites.
Say a subscription costs 2,000 rubles (about $23) a month for four articles, your hour costs 400 rubles (about $5), and checking takes 90 minutes. That is between the half hour to one hour that reviews mention and the three hours one consultant spent. You get 500 rubles of subscription and 600 rubles of checking, 1,100 rubles (about $13) in total. The agency Sdelaem lists an article at 4,000–8,000 rubles (about $47–94) in its May 2026 price list. So yours comes out about 4–7 times cheaper, but only while the AI collects the facts. If you collect them yourself, add those hours.
- Divide the monthly service fee by the number of articles.
- Time the fact-check with a stopwatch until every number is matched to its source.
- In a note, write down the minutes of checking multiplied by your hourly price, plus the share of the subscription. Count thrown-away drafts too, but divide by published articles.
- After a month, divide the total by the page views in Yandex Metrica (free web analytics from Yandex, Russia's largest search engine).
If checking took longer than writing it yourself, collect the facts yourself and leave only the text to the AI. That is what we advise for expert topics. If it took less, keep writing and recalculate in a month.
Frequently asked questions
Will Yandex penalize an article written by AI?
Yandex does not penalize an article just because AI was used, but it ranks empty text lower. The Yandex help for webmasters, opened in September 2026, says that AI can help an author but should not replace them. It calls text weak when AI assembles it from other people's content without adding anything useful.
Which is cheaper, AI or a copywriter?
Text from AI is cheaper, but not everyone manages to save money. In a survey of 879 marketers that Ahrefs published in June 2025, the most common answer (45%) was "we didn't save money", and 38% said they saved on writers. The survey authors write that with AI, companies publish more articles on the same budget.
How long does it take to check an AI article?
People name anything from half an hour to three hours for checking an AI article, but there is no reliable measurement. The vendor Sight AI writes about 30–60 minutes based on "industry observations", and consultant Lilach Bullock spent almost three hours rewriting a commissioned post from a freelance marketplace that had made-up examples. She does not say who wrote it. It is more reliable to time yourself on two or three articles.