How much editing can an AI draft afford?

A draft takes fifteen minutes instead of an hour. That sounds like a strong result—until someone spends twenty minutes checking the claims, five drafts are rejected, and the team still needs twenty finished articles.

The useful unit is an approved article that meets the brief. Count every attempt needed to reach it, including the work you discard. Then compare that workload with the current process at the same output and editorial standard.

Our local calculator answers two questions: what each workflow costs under your inputs, and how much review time the AI workflow can absorb before its modeled advantage disappears. All built-in figures are fictional. They illustrate the arithmetic; they are not observed productivity or product recommendations.

What counts as an approved article

Set the acceptance conditions before the trial. For a product comparison, that could mean traceable prices, preserved qualifications, a useful decision, suitable internal links and an editor's approval. A grammatical draft with unsupported claims has not passed.

Use one brief and one intended deliverable for each pair. Comparing a short introductory post with a researched buying guide would make the cost per article misleading. If work differs substantially, compare separate baskets rather than hiding everything in one average.

Use the AI writing software guide to define the job and shortlist relevant tools before entering numbers. This calculator makes the cost inputs explicit, holds approved output equal and solves the review-time boundary.

The part a fast drafting demo leaves out

Research can demonstrate useful gains without providing your budget inputs. MIT's report on a 2023 writing experiment describes faster task completion, but notes that the assignments did not require precise factual accuracy or company-specific context and that the researchers did not hire fact-checkers. Its reported improvement is not a default saving for a researched software article. MIT study report ↗.

A CHI 2025 survey of knowledge workers describes a shift toward information verification, response integration and task stewardship. It is self-reported evidence about work practices, not a measurement of minutes saved by a particular writing product. Research publication ↗.

Time your own prompting, drafting, checking and finishing. A review step does not become free because it happens in another person's calendar.

Compare the same twenty approved articles

Suppose a team needs twenty comparable articles in a month and allocates labor at USD 40 per hour. The table is a hypothetical planning scenario, with no vendor prices or measured acceptance rates.

For the current workflow, twenty attempts take 1,500 drafting-and-review minutes. Finishing adds 300. At USD 40 per hour, 1,800 minutes cost USD 1,200; software makes the monthly total USD 1,220, or USD 61 per approved article.

The AI workflow needs 25 × (15 + 20) = 875 attempt minutes. Finishing adds 400. Allocating the four-hour setup over three months adds 80 minutes per month. The total is 1,355 minutes: USD 903.33 of allocated labor plus USD 100 of software, or USD 1,003.33. That is USD 50.17 per approved article and a modeled monthly difference of USD 216.67.

Drafting is 45 minutes faster per attempt in this example. The whole workflow frees about 7.42 allocated hours per month, after including rejected work and setup allocation. It does not necessarily reduce payroll or create additional demand.

Find the review budget that changes the decision

Hold the other inputs fixed and ask how much review each AI attempt can require before the two totals meet. For the example, the answer is 33 minutes per attempt. Across 25 attempts that is 825 review minutes, or 41.25 review minutes per approved article. The denominator matters: the threshold charges review to rejected attempts too.

This is a sensitivity analysis, not a forecast. A change in the acceptance rate changes the number of attempts; a change in review difficulty changes the time spent on each. Neither should be copied from a vendor's best demonstration.

Here the simple cost ratio becomes an explicit review-time budget at equal approved output. It makes the question testable: can your team keep average review below that boundary while maintaining the agreed standard? If it cannot, a cheaper subscription or faster first draft will not settle the comparison.

The formula and its boundaries

The calculator uses one approved-output target, one hourly rate and one setup-allocation period for both workflows. For either workflow, let Q be approved articles, A total attempts, d drafting or prompting minutes per attempt, r review-and-correction minutes per attempt, and f finishing minutes per approved article. Let F be allocated monthly software cost, v variable charge per attempt, w hourly labor cost, S one-time setup minutes and H months of setup allocation.

Monthly modeled cost = F + A × v + (w ÷ 60) × [A × (d + r) + Q × f + S ÷ H].

Divide by Q for cost per approved article. Count review and finishing in separate buckets; do not put the same correction in both. The simple model uses one average hourly rate for all work. Where roles have materially different costs, calculate their work separately before comparing totals.

The maximum AI review time is found by solving that formula against the current workflow's total. If it is negative, the AI workflow already costs more with zero review minutes under the other inputs. If w is zero, the calculator compares software and usage charges but cannot solve a time-based threshold. A zero value is an explicit exclusion of labor, not evidence that people's time is free.

Setup allocation is a budgeting convention, not a payment schedule or a prediction that the workflow will last H months. Compare the first month separately when its full setup load matters. Taxes, financing, revenue, extra contractors, contractual exit charges and future price changes are outside this version; include applicable costs in your own decision.

Record the discarded work without counting it twice

An attempt is a candidate draft you actually spend time producing or reviewing. Multiple prompts refining one candidate do not automatically become several full attempts. Record their minutes in that candidate. A discarded candidate and a replacement are separate attempts if both consumed work.

Use average attempt minutes across all candidates. Timing only the successful drafts understates the cost when failures are difficult to diagnose. Use those observed averages for the central cost estimate. For a less favorable scenario, you can substitute an observed 80th-percentile correction time, as the shortlist suggests; label it as a stress case rather than an average or a guaranteed upper bound. Record final finishing only for the approved outputs. When a draft is revised until it passes, keep its actual cumulative time; do not also add a fictional replacement attempt.

The downloadable worksheet separates brief IDs, attempts, approved outputs, review time and the evidence for each input. Start with a manageable batch and retain its context. A small convenient sample cannot establish a universal acceptance rate, and this calculator does not provide a statistical confidence interval.

Separate a smaller bill from more available time

The example adds USD 80 per month in software while allocating USD 296.67 less labor. Its USD 216.67 difference is therefore an economic comparison, not a USD 216.67 reduction in the bank payment.

If the same employees remain on salary, the benefit may be capacity for other work. Count cash savings only when a bill or paid work is actually avoided. A shared subscription should receive a defensible share of its cost, not the full price in several separate project budgets. If buying for this project creates the whole charge, include the whole relevant charge instead.

A workflow that fails the acceptance conditions remains unsuitable even if its calculated total is low. Keep factual verification, permission to use source material and data handling as separate gates. Our governance guide covers those buying questions.

Use the calculator with your own evidence

The calculator has numeric fields, a currency selector and an acceptance checkbox. Enter aggregate counts and time estimates only. The worksheet also has free-text note fields: keep article text, client names, confidential documents and credentials out of both resources. Calculations run locally in the browser, without an account or connected writing service. Exporting results creates a separate JSON file under your control. The downloadable HTML worksheet provides fields for a local record; inspect the browser print preview before relying on a filled printout.

Replace the example with a matched batch, inspect the review-time boundary and test a less favorable scenario. The decision becomes stronger when the apparent advantage survives ordinary rejected drafts and corrections. It becomes weaker when it depends on ignoring them.

Method and sources

BenPicks implemented this cost-accounting model, scenario arithmetic, local calculator and worksheet. No writing-product benchmark, actual saving or search-performance result is claimed. Research sources supply context only; they do not supply the example's prices, times, approval rates or quality judgments. Source check: 29 October 2026. Publication date remains unset pending review and owner authorization.

• MIT News, 14 July 2023 ↗ — experimental context and limits on extrapolation to fact-checked, company-specific work.
• Lee and colleagues, CHI 2025 ↗ — self-reported information verification, response integration and task stewardship; no causal time estimate used here.