Word Cost Calculator

Curated by Vinod Kumar Jain & Amit Jain · All Frontier Global · free, no login

Content budgets fail in one of two directions: you know the volume and need the cost, or you know the budget and need to know what it buys. This does both, per piece and per month. The rate is yours — no market rate is embedded, because what writers charge varies by language, subject, research depth and who is asking.

The arithmetic

• Cost per piece = words × rate per word + fixed cost per piece
• Cost per month = cost per piece × pieces per month · Cost per year = that × 12
• Solving the other way: words a budget affords = (budget − fixed costs across the pieces) ÷ rate per word
• Effective cost per word = cost per piece ÷ words — which is higher than the headline rate once fixed costs are included

Honest limits

• No market rate is embedded or suggested. Per-word rates vary by language, subject, research depth, turnaround and who is commissioning. Anyone publishing a single authoritative rate is selling something.
• Per-word pricing measures the wrong thing. It rewards length and penalises editing, and the pieces that take longest are often the shortest. Use it for budgeting, not for judging value.
• The fixed cost per piece is where budgets break. Editing, fact-checking, images, legal review and rework routinely cost more than the drafting; leaving them at zero produces a number that will not survive contact with a real commission.
• Nothing here accounts for tax, currency, agency margin or the cost of your own time managing the work.

Sources

None. No rate card, market benchmark or freelance survey is embedded, fetched or implied — the rate in the calculation is the one you entered.

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