Compare AI models by what they actually cost
Prices checked 10 Oct 2026 · 56 models · 9 providers
Cheapest in each tier
Tiers group models by capability, not price.
Budget
High volume, simple tasksIn / out price per 1 million tokens. Tiers are our grouping by capability and price; one model per provider, ranked by a 3:1 input-to-output blend. Legacy models and models closed to new users are left out.
Latest price changes
- o4-miniOpenAI shuts down o4-mini; removed from our tables. GPT-5.6 Terra is OpenAI's recommended replacement. Azure keeps serving its o4-mini until 19 Nov 2026OpenAI pricingRetired
- Claude Haiku 5.5In$0.10Out$0.50Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10/$0.50 for prompts up to 100K tokens, a tenth of Haiku 4.5's $1/$5. A prompt over 100K tokens, cache reads and writes included, bills the whole request at $0.50/$2.50. 1M context, 128K max output, 50% batch discount. It ties GPT-6 Luna on short prompts; Haiku 4.5 moves to legacyClaude pricingLaunch
- Claude Sonnet 5.5Anthropic halves Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache reads from $0.20 to $0.10/MTok (0.05x input, the same multiplier as Opus 5.5). Token rates and cache writes are unchanged; Sonnet 5.5 now matches GPT-6.1 Sol's $0.10 cached inputClaude pricing▼ Price cut
- The Manus free plan refreshes 300 credits a day, capped at 1,500 a month, with no starter pack.Tier change
- DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek V4 ProDeepSeek's off-peak rate now also covers Chinese public holidays in full.DeepSeek pricingTier change
Subscriptions and plans
The vendor sets local prices. Where we haven’t seen a vendor’s price in your currency, it stays in US dollars.
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Yes, completely free. No sign-up, no email capture, no credit card. All tools — the cost calculator, comparison table, charts, and pricing history — are available immediately without an account.
What is a token in AI pricing?
A token is the unit AI models use to process text — roughly 4 characters, or about three-quarters of an English word. APIs bill per token, so a 1,000-word prompt is around 1,300 input tokens. Every price on this site is quoted per million tokens (MTok).
What is the absolute cheapest AI API right now?
By input cost, Meta Llama 3.1 8B at ~$0.02/MTok input and ~$0.04/MTok output is the cheapest, with Llama 4 Scout next at $0.10 — though both are offered through third-party hosts, so pricing varies by provider. The cheapest we track from a major first-party API is Google Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite at $0.10/MTok input and $0.40/MTok output ($0.05/$0.20 with batch processing), but since 18 September 2026 Google has limited it to developers who have used it before. For a new project, the cheapest current-generation first-party options we track are tied: OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna ($0.10/$0.50, or $0.05/$0.25 with batch processing) and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 ($0.10/$0.50, or $0.05/$0.25 with batch). Haiku 5.5's rate covers prompts up to 100,000 tokens only, rising to $0.50/$2.50 above that, while Luna keeps its rate up to 272K tokens and then rises to $0.20/$0.75, so Luna is the cheaper of the two for long prompts.
How often are prices updated?
We update pricing data monthly and whenever a provider announces a price change. Exchange rates for currency conversion are updated daily. Every provider page links to the official pricing docs so you can verify the source.
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