Running costs
Visitors are not charged. The project pays Google Cloud for the Mumbai services below. Rupee amounts use about ₹84 to one US dollar so the size is easy to judge. The bill itself is in US dollars. These are Google’s published list prices as read in September 2026, not a fixed quote.
Cost of each feature
| Feature | What is billed | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Opening the website | Static hosting of the pages | ₹0 at the traffic of a student demonstration |
| Tax assessment, regime comparison, and ITR suggestion | Calculated in the browser | ₹0 |
| Google sign-in | Confirms the Google account | ₹0 |
| Saving an assessment | A short API call, then one small Firestore document in Mumbai | Inside the free daily quota for a demonstration. After that, a fraction of a rupee per save |
| Reading Form 16, AIS, Form 26AS, a broker statement, or a home-loan certificate | Document AI Form Parser, one page at a time | USD 0.03 per page, about ₹2.50 |
| Reading a bill when you selected “Freelance or business bill” | Document AI Invoice Parser. One count is a document of up to 10 pages | USD 0.10 per bill, about ₹8.50. An 11 to 20 page bill is USD 0.20 |
| “Choose for me” | The form reader first. If the file is a bill and that read did not find the bill fields, an invoice read follows | USD 0.03 per page, plus USD 0.10 when the second bill read is needed |
| Fallback read when the form reader finds nothing | Gemini 2.5 Flash sees that one file and may only copy the known fields | Usually under ₹1. It does not run when the first read already found fields |
| “What this means” | Only when you click it. Gemini 2.5 Flash, at most 120 output tokens, and never for a PAN | Under USD 0.01 per click, well under ₹1 |
| Keeping the uploaded file | Deleted when the read finishes. Anything left is deleted within a day | Not a meaningful per-person cost |
The API scales to zero, so an idle site does not keep a server running. Cloud Run in Mumbai is on Google’s lower request price: about USD 0.000024 per vCPU-second and USD 0.0000025 per GiB-second while a request runs, plus USD 0.40 per million requests, after a monthly free allowance of 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests. A single document read on that API is a fraction of a US cent. Document reading is the cost that matters.
Document reading for one person
This example is one salaried person who also has investments. Page counts vary; the prices are the list price times an assumed length.
| Document | Assumption | Document AI |
|---|---|---|
| Form 16 | 4 pages, form reader | USD 0.12, about ₹10 |
| Annual Information Statement | 8 pages, form reader | USD 0.24, about ₹20 |
| Form 26AS | 3 pages, form reader | USD 0.09, about ₹8 |
| Broker capital-gains statement | 6 pages, form reader | USD 0.18, about ₹15 |
| One sample Form 16 from this site | 1 page, form reader | USD 0.03, about ₹2.50 |
| One bill, type chosen by you | Up to 10 pages, invoice reader | USD 0.10, about ₹8.50 |
| One bill, “Choose for me”, first read incomplete | 1 page on the form reader, then the invoice reader | USD 0.13, about ₹11 |
The four statements in the first rows come to 21 pages and USD 0.63, about ₹53, for that one person. Saving the assessment and calculating the tax add nothing meaningful on top. Two or three “What this means” clicks stay under a rupee together.
Above one million form-reader pages in a month, Google’s published Form Parser price falls from USD 30 to USD 20 per 1,000 pages. This prototype will not reach that tier.
Sources
Firestore’s published free quota is 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, and 1 GiB stored each day. Past that quota the common published rates are about USD 0.03 per 100,000 reads and USD 0.09 per 100,000 writes; use the Mumbai row on Google’s page if it differs. A budget alert on this project is set at ₹5,000.