Live Token Economics • September 2026

Compare AI Model Token Costs & Inference Ratios

Stop guessing your monthly LLM bill. We normalize real-time prompt, completion, and cached token pricing across top models—from Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro to DeepSeek V4 and o3-mini.

Cheapest Intelligence
$0.100 / 1M In
Top: Llama 4 Scout
Top Reasoning Model
$0.500 / 1M In
Top: DeepSeek R1
Coding & Architecture
$2.00 / 1M In
Top: Claude Sonnet 5
20 AI Models
8 Providers
Daily Rate Feeds

Interactive LLM Monthly Bill Estimator

Adjust your monthly token volume to see the true cost difference across every model.

Quick Workload Presets
10 Million Tokens
500K25M50M100M200M
2.5 Million Tokens
100K10M25M50M
Total Monthly Volume:12.5M Tokens
Input / Output Ratio:4.0:1
Showing 20 AI models normalized for your workloadComparison baseline: GPT-5.6 Terra ($50.00/mo)
Mistral AI

Mistral Medium 3.5

A+

Mistral Medium 3.5 is a dense 128B instruction-following model from Mistral AI.

Estimated Monthly Bill
$33.75/ month
Input: $15.00 • Output: $18.75
🎉 Saves 33% vs GPT-5.6 Terra
Input / 1M$1.50
Output / 1M$7.50
Blended Rate$3.00
📚 262K Context
Fast
👁️ Vision
Best for: Multilingual enterprise European deployments, GDPR compliance, synthetic data
Qwen / Alibaba

Qwen3.8 Max

C

Qwen3.8 Max is the flagship model in Alibaba's Qwen3.8 series, the general-availability successor to the Qwen3.8 Max Preview.

Estimated Monthly Bill
$35.00/ month
Input: $20.00 • Output: $15.00
🎉 Saves 30% vs GPT-5.6 Terra
Input / 1M$2.00
Output / 1M$6.00
Cached Input$0.25
📚 1M Context
Fast
👁️ Vision
Best for: Top-tier multilingual intelligence, complex math problem solving, open model fine-tuning

Full Token Pricing Benchmark Table

Comprehensive breakdown of input rates, output rates, prompt cache discounts, and context limits.

Model & Vendor Category Input / 1M Output / 1M Cached Read / 1M Context Window CostRatio Score
Llama 4 Scout Meta (Hosted)
Open Weights $0.100 $0.300 1.3M A+
Qwen3 Coder Next Qwen / Alibaba
Coding & Specialized $0.120 $0.800 $0.070 262K A+
Llama 4 Maverick Meta (Hosted)
Open Weights $0.200 $0.696 1M A
DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp DeepSeek
Budget & Fast $0.220 $0.660 $0.0070 1M A
GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI
Budget & Fast $0.200 $1.20 $0.020 1.1M A
Devstral 2 Mistral AI
Coding & Specialized $0.400 $2.00 $0.040 262K A
Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite Google Cloud / AI Studio
Budget & Fast $0.300 $2.50 $0.030 1M B
DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek
Budget & Fast $0.580 $1.74 $0.019 1M B
DeepSeek R1 DeepSeek
Reasoning & Thinking $0.500 $2.15 $0.350 164K A+
Gemini 3.8 Flash Google Cloud / AI Studio
Budget & Fast $0.750 $3.75 $0.075 1M B
OpenAI o3 Mini High OpenAI
Reasoning & Thinking $1.10 $4.40 $0.550 200K A
Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic
Budget & Fast $1.00 $5.00 $0.100 200K C
Mistral Medium 3.5 Mistral AI
Frontier Flagship $1.50 $7.50 262K A+
Grok 4.6 xAI
Frontier Flagship $2.00 $6.00 $0.500 500K A+
Qwen3.8 Max Qwen / Alibaba
Open Weights $2.00 $6.00 $0.250 1M C
OpenAI o3 OpenAI
Reasoning & Thinking $2.00 $8.00 $0.500 200K A
Claude Sonnet 5 Anthropic
Frontier Flagship $2.00 $10.00 $0.200 1M A
Gemini 3.1 Pro (Preview) Google Cloud / AI Studio
Frontier Flagship $2.00 $12.00 $0.200 1M A
GPT-5.6 Terra OpenAI
Frontier Flagship $2.00 $12.00 $0.200 1.1M A
Claude Opus 5 Anthropic
Reasoning & Thinking $5.00 $25.00 $0.500 1M B

Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about AI inference pricing and token economics.

What is the cheapest AI model API in 2026?

As of 2026, the cheapest mainstream LLM APIs are DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.065/1M input, $0.18/1M output), Llama 4 Scout ($0.10/1M input, $0.30/1M output), and Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite ($0.30/1M input, $2.50/1M output).

How much cheaper is DeepSeek R1 than OpenAI o1?

DeepSeek R1 charges approximately $0.70 per 1M input tokens and $2.50 per 1M output tokens. OpenAI o1 charges $15.00 per 1M input and $60.00 per 1M output. This makes DeepSeek R1 roughly 96% cheaper while delivering competitive reasoning performance on math and coding benchmarks.

What is a blended token cost?

A blended token cost calculates the average price per 1M tokens assuming a standard 3:1 input-to-output ratio. Since output tokens are typically 3x to 5x more expensive than prompt tokens, blended pricing gives a more realistic picture of your actual monthly bill.

What is prompt caching and how does it reduce LLM costs?

Prompt caching stores frequently repeated context (such as system instructions, document repositories, or codebases) on the provider's servers. Providers like Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, and Google discount cached prompt reads by 50% to 90%, drastically lowering costs for conversational agents and RAG applications.

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