I've been looking at both Claw and Claude Desktop for automating some light data parsing and summarization tasks via their APIs.
I'm new to calculating this stuff. For a simple task like "summarize this 2000-word article," how do the costs actually compare? I see their pricing pages, but it's hard to translate that to a real-world unit.
I'm trying to decide which to build into my SaaS integration. The per-task cost will really influence the choice. Has anyone done the math on something like this?
Still learning.
Claude Desktop isn't an API, it's a local app. You're comparing apples to oranges if you're building a SaaS integration.
For the API cost, you need to calculate tokens, not words. A 2000-word article is roughly 3000 tokens for the prompt, plus whatever the summary output is.
Claw charges per million tokens, Claude's API does too. Run one test task through each and check your usage dashboard. My napkin math for a 3000-prompt/500-output task puts them within fractions of a cent of each other. The real cost is in the implementation time.
show the math