The Free AI Model Picker — Price Your Team by Role

Here's a question that quietly costs businesses real money every month: which AI model should each of your agents actually run? Most people never decide. They point everything at one big-name model, watch the bill climb, and never realize that the secretary answering routine email is billed at the same premium rate as the coder doing hard work. Overkill on one side, waste on the other — and no clear way to see the difference before it lands on an invoice.

The instinct to just "use the best model" is expensive because the best model is also the priciest, and most agent work doesn't need it. The fix isn't a spreadsheet you build from scratch — it's a two-minute tool that assigns a model to each role and prices the whole team live. That's exactly what the free AI Model Picker by Role does.

Stop guessing, start seeing the price

The tool opens with five roles already laid out — secretary, coder, researcher, copywriter, designer — each pre-matched to a model that suits its job. From there, nothing is locked. The value is in how concretely it turns a fuzzy "which model?" question into a number you can act on:

• A model per agent, not one for everything. Point the coder at a strong model and the secretary at a cheap capable one, right in a dropdown. Each role gets what its work actually demands.

• Live prices, not a stale chart. Per-token prices are pulled straight from the OpenRouter catalog when you open the page, with Xiaomi MiMo added at its official rate so budget options sit right alongside the frontier ones.

• Every field is editable. Rename a role, add or delete one, change the input and output tokens per task, set how many tasks a month it handles — the estimate follows your real workload, not a canned assumption.

• Monthly and yearly totals in real time. A running per-role cost and a team total update the moment you change anything, so you can feel the impact of a single model swap instantly.

• No markup, because you bring your own key. The numbers are the raw provider prices. In OfficeForge you pay the model provider directly, so what you see is your only running model cost — not a per-seat SaaS fee.

It's the difference between hoping your model choices are sane and watching the bill add up before you commit to a single one. If you want the reasoning behind *which* model belongs on *which* role, we go deep on that in picking a model for each role — this tool is where you put that thinking into numbers.

How the number is built — and how to push it down

The math is honest and visible: for each role, monthly cost is your task count times the input plus output tokens per task, times that model's live per-token price. Because a real agent task is a multi-step loop — plan, call tools, act, review — tokens per task run higher than a single chat prompt, and the defaults reflect that. When your provider invoices tell a different story, you edit the fields and the estimate snaps to your reality.

What makes it more than a calculator is that it shows you the levers:

• Downgrade the routine roles. Most of a team's tasks are light. Drop the secretary and designer to cheaper models and the total often falls further than you'd expect.

• Try a budget model for real work. Options like Xiaomi MiMo sit at the top of every dropdown, so you can test a low-cost model on the coder and compare in one click.

• Route overhead to a free local helper. A toggle sends routine overhead — context compression, titles, page extraction — to a free model running on the box, and trims the paid-token estimate accordingly.

• Share the line-up. One button copies a link that reopens with the exact same roles, models and numbers, so a teammate sees precisely what you decided.

From estimate to a running office

The reason this tool exists as more than a novelty: the per-role model assignment it produces is exactly how OfficeForge runs. In the product you set a model for each agent the same way — the coder on something strong, the rest tuned for cost — and you plug in your own key. The estimate you build here is the running cost of that office, on top of a single one-time payment rather than a monthly per-seat charge. So the picker isn't a sales gimmick bolted onto the product; it's a working preview of the exact control panel you get.

That also means the tool is genuinely useful even if you never buy anything. Model-by-role pricing is good discipline for any AI setup, self-hosted or not — knowing what each agent costs is the first step to not overpaying for any of them.

Try it in two minutes

Open the AI Model Picker by Role, keep the default roles or make them yours, and assign a model to each. Watch the monthly and yearly totals settle, pull the levers to see how low you can take it, and grab a share link when it looks right. You'll walk away knowing what an AI team actually costs to run — priced the way you'd actually run it.