How Much Does It Cost to Write a Novel With AI? Credits, Subscriptions and Price per Word
Writing a novel with an AI tool costs anywhere from a few dollars to well over a hundred, and one variable decides where you land: what you ask the AI to do. Having it read your chapters is cheap, because the AI reads a lot and answers briefly. Having it write or rewrite your text is expensive, because every word it produces is billed, usually on top of the words you send it. At Ecrivium, a French writing studio where one credit equals one word sent or received, getting an 80,000-word novel read chapter by chapter fits in one month of its €25 plan, while rewriting the whole thing does not. Sudowrite itself estimates that generating an 80,000-word novel costs $10 to $180 depending on the model. This guide shows you how to run that math for your own book, with prices checked on November 3, 2026.
Why the price on the pricing page tells you almost nothing
An AI writing subscription has two layers. The first is the monthly price, in big type. The second is how much AI that price buys, expressed in credits, words or tokens. The second layer decides whether your novel fits in one month or six.
How the pricing models compare over several years (one-time purchase, subscription, credits) is covered in subscription, one-time purchase or AI credits. This article goes one level down: how many credits for a chapter, how many chapters per month, how many months per novel.
Three units show up on pricing pages, and they don't convert into one another:
- Words. Ecrivium counts every word sent to the AI and every word it sends back. It's the easiest unit to reason about.
- Variable-rate credits. Sudowrite gives you a monthly credit allowance, but its help center says there is no way to predict how many credits a feature will use. Cost depends on the model, how much text it reads and the feature.
- Tokens. Bring-your-own-key tools such as Novelcrafter send you to your AI provider's bill, which counts tokens. Novelcrafter notes that a token isn't the same across models: roughly 0.75 words for GPT models, one character for Gemini models.
Reading versus generating: the gap that makes the bill
Take a made-up example for the math: an 80,000-word novel in 20 chapters of 4,000 words.
Getting a chapter read. You send 4,000 words, the AI returns about 1,000 words of feedback. Total: 5,000 words in transit.
Getting a chapter rewritten. You send 4,000 words, the AI returns 4,000. Total: 8,000 words.
Getting a chapter generated from an outline. You send an outline and your notes, say 1,500 words, and the AI produces 4,000. Total: 5,500 words, but those 4,000 words aren't yours, and you'll almost always have to redo them, which means paying again.
On a per-word tool, reading the whole novel moves about 100,000 words. Rewriting it moves 160,000. Those figures are a floor: if the tool also sends your character notes or series bible with every request to stay consistent, each call costs more. Novelcrafter says as much about its own costs: the real figure depends on the size of your Codex, the context length and the length of the reply.
The rule to keep in mind: what costs money is the text the AI produces and the context it rereads each time, not the hours you spend in the app.
The math, tool by tool
Prices checked on November 3, 2026, on each company's website. Euro and dollar amounts are given as displayed, without conversion.
Ecrivium: billed by the word
Ecrivium includes AI credits in two plans: IA & Cohérence at €25 a month with 150,000 credits valid for 60 days, and Master at €50 a month with 300,000 credits valid for 90 days. Its pricing page spells out the rule: one credit equals one word sent or received. Its AI suggests rewrites that you accept, edit or reject one by one.
With our 20-chapter novel:
| Use | Words in transit | On IA & Cohérence (150,000 credits) |
|---|---|---|
| One read of every chapter | about 100,000 | Fits in one month |
| One rewrite of every chapter | about 160,000 | About 10,000 credits short |
| Two reads (before and after revision) | about 200,000 | A little over a month |
Two things to check before subscribing: the page doesn't say whether context (notes, summaries) is counted on top of the chapter, and credit top-ups are announced without a listed price.
Sudowrite: credits that depend on the model
Sudowrite lists three plans: Hobby & Student at $10 a month with 225,000 credits, Professional at $22, and Max at $44 with 2,000,000 credits and a 12-month rollover of unused credits. For Professional, the pricing page shows both 450,000 and 1,000,000 credits without saying which applies, so ask before paying.
A credit has no fixed value. Sudowrite's help center gives an example: generating 200 words used about 70 credits with GPT-5 Nano and over 8,000 with Claude 4.1 Opus, a gap of more than 100x. In its article on the cost of writing a novel with AI (published April 12, 2026, updated October 19, 2026), Sudowrite estimates per 1,000 generated words about 500 credits with DeepSeek V3, 6,000 with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, 12,000 with Muse 1.5 and 30,000 with Claude 3 Opus.
On those estimates, the 225,000 credits of the $10 plan produce about 450,000 words with the cheapest model, but only 18,750 words with Muse 1.5, fewer than five chapters of our example. Hence the $10 to $180 per novel range the company gives. What Sudowrite does well, and what its model means if you want to write your own words, is covered in our Sudowrite review.
Novelcrafter: the subscription plus your provider's bill
Novelcrafter sells the app (Scribe at $4 a month with no AI, Hobbyist at $8, Artisan at $14, Specialist at $20) and lets you plug in your own AI key. The subscription includes no AI usage: you pay the provider you pick.
Its FAQ prices an example request: 4,176 tokens sent, 500 tokens received. At the API prices Anthropic listed on November 3, 2026, that request costs:
| Model | Price per million tokens (input / output) | Cost of the example request |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 / $0.50 | under a tenth of a cent |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 / $10 | about 1.3 cents |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 / $20 | about 2.7 cents |
At that rate, a thousand requests of that size on Sonnet 5.5 cost about $13, on top of the Novelcrafter subscription. The cost per request stays low, but the bill arrives after the fact, and it grows with how much you send each time. Novelcrafter also points to free or local models, whose quality you'll want to judge on your own pages. The rest of the app, including its Codex, is reviewed in our Novelcrafter review.
A general-purpose assistant on a flat fee
Then there's the option many writers use without counting it: a subscription to a general-purpose assistant. Claude Pro, for example, costs $20 a month billed monthly, or $17 a month billed annually. The price is fixed, but the assistant doesn't keep your manuscript organized into chapters and notes: you paste the context back into each conversation. What an assistant like this does well, and where it stalls on a novel, is covered in can ChatGPT write a novel?.
And at Sagoræ
Sagoræ also runs on credits: 100 a month on the Auteur plan (€9.99 a month) and 300 on the Atelier plan (€19.99 a month). They pay for readings by the coaches, which comment on your text without rewriting it, and no reading starts unless you ask for it. The homepage doesn't yet spell out how many credits each reading costs, so if that matters for your budget, ask before choosing a paid plan, as you would with any tool on this list. The app's interface is in French for now.
The costs you won't see on the pricing page
Credits that expire. At Ecrivium, credits are valid for 60 or 90 days depending on the plan. At Sudowrite, only Max advertises a 12-month rollover. A month without writing can be a month paid for nothing.
Top-ups. When your allowance runs out mid-revision, you top up or wait. Check the top-up price before you need it: it isn't always listed.
Context sent again. A tool that rereads your notes and earlier chapters on every request is more consistent, and more expensive. It's a fair trade, as long as you know you're making it.
Rewriting the rewrite. A generated chapter you redo three times costs three times. It's the most underestimated expense, and the reason Sudowrite's range climbs so high.
Currency. Ecrivium bills in euros. Depending on your bank, foreign transaction fees may apply.
How to estimate the cost of your own novel
Before picking a tool, take ten minutes and write down your answers:
- How long will your novel be? Note the word count and number of chapters. For a first pass, a rough figure is enough.
- What will you ask the AI to do? Read, flag inconsistencies, fix grammar, rewrite, generate. Check what's true for you, not what the tool offers.
- How many times per chapter? One read before revision, one after? Multiply.
- Convert to the tool's unit. Per word: add what you send and what you receive. Variable credits: use the company's estimate for the model you plan to use. Tokens: use the provider's price per million tokens.
- Compare with the monthly allowance, then with your real pace. A novel revised over eight months doesn't need a plan sized for a one-month revision.
Run the comparison with human help too: a developmental edit or a professional proofread doesn't do the same job as an AI, and its price works differently. Who does what, and at what rates, is explained in developmental, line and copy editing.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to have AI write a whole novel? According to Sudowrite's own estimate, between $10 and $180 for 80,000 generated words, depending on the model. That figure doesn't include redoing passages or revising, and the result isn't written by you.
Is getting AI feedback on a novel expensive? Much less than having it written. On a per-word tool like Ecrivium, reading an 80,000-word novel chapter by chapter moves about 100,000 words, less than one month of its IA & Cohérence plan.
What is an AI credit? A usage unit specific to each tool. At Ecrivium, one credit is one word sent or received. At Sudowrite, its value changes with the model and feature, with a gap of more than 100x between the cheapest and most expensive model.
Is it better to pay per credit or bring your own AI key? With your own key, a request like the one Novelcrafter prices costs a few cents at most, but the bill comes afterwards and varies with how much you send. Credits give you a predictable ceiling. The right choice depends on how much you dislike surprises more than on price.
Do unused credits expire? It depends on the tool: at Ecrivium they expire after 60 or 90 days; at Sudowrite only the Max plan advertises a 12-month rollover. Check this on the pricing page before you subscribe.
If you want a studio where AI reads your chapters without writing them for you, try Sagoræ for free.
✒️ Read next: Free Novel Writing Software: An Honest Comparison (Reedsy Studio, Novlr, Scribbook, WriteControl, bibisco, yWriter, Sagoræ) · Sudowrite Alternative for Writers Who Want to Write Their Own Words · WriteControl Review 2026: Features, Pricing and Who It's For
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