Word Counter & Price-per-Word Calculator

A word counter that also answers “what should I charge?”

Most word counters stop at the number. For freelance writers, editors and translators, the number is only the first step: a client wants a price, and you want to know whether that price pays for the hours the piece will take. This tool does all three in one place. Paste a draft or a brief and it counts words, characters, sentences and paragraphs and estimates reading and speaking time. It can strip the formatting that comes along with pasted text, then turn the word count into a per-word fee and show what that fee works out to per hour at your own pace.

Everything runs in your browser. The text is not uploaded, logged or saved, which matters when you are pasting a client’s unpublished draft or a contract under NDA.

How the counts work

• Words are runs of characters between spaces that contain at least one letter or number. “Well-known” and “it’s” count once, “42” counts, and a dash or bullet on its own does not.
• Characters are counted as you see them on screen, so an emoji or an accented letter counts once even when it is built from several underlying code points. The tool shows counts with and without spaces, because some publishers and translation clients price or limit by characters.
• Sentences use the browser’s built-in language rules where available, so abbreviations such as “e.g.” are less likely to split a sentence.
• Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line.

Different programs disagree by a few words on edge cases such as URLs, footnote markers and symbols. If a client’s word count governs the invoice, agree in advance which tool or document setting will be used.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time uses 238 words per minute and speaking time 183, the averages for silent reading and for reading aloud of English non-fiction in a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert. Many online tools use round numbers such as 200 or 250; the defaults here have a stated source, and you can change both. A 1,190-word article takes about five minutes to read silently at the default pace. A talk or video script of the same length runs about six and a half minutes aloud.

Cleaning pasted text

Text copied from PDFs, websites, chat apps and word processors often carries hidden clutter: double spaces, line breaks in the middle of sentences, curly quotes a CMS mangles, and invisible characters such as zero-width spaces and non-breaking spaces that break searches and counts. Tick the fixes you want and press Clean text. Joining wrapped lines keeps real paragraph breaks, which are marked by a blank line, so the structure survives. Then copy the result as plain text.

Turning a word count into a quote

The pricing section takes four inputs: your per-word rate, the words you finish per hour for this kind of work, the hourly revenue you want the job to clear, and an optional minimum fee.

Take a 1,500-word article at $0.15 a word. The per-word fee is 1,500 × $0.15 = $225. If your records show you finish about 400 words an hour, including research and revisions, the job takes 1,500 ÷ 400 = 3.75 hours, so the fee pays $225 ÷ 3.75 = $60 an hour. Against a $75 target, the same hours would justify $281.25, and the per-word rate that meets the target is $75 ÷ 400 = $0.1875. Those figures are illustrative; your pace and target come from your own records and the hourly rate calculator.

The minimum fee protects short jobs. At the same $0.15, a 300-word piece is $45, which may not cover the briefing, invoicing and revisions a small job still needs. With a $150 minimum, the quote shows $150 and labels that the minimum was applied.

If you price by the hour or the project instead, the writing-rate conversion guide shows how to move between per-word, hourly and flat fees, and the project-pricing example covers estimating a scoped job.

What the tool does not do

It does not check grammar, plagiarism or readability scores, and it does not know what clients in your field typically pay. It counts, cleans and does the pricing arithmetic you set up, privately, so you can quote with a number you understand.