The Open AI Price Calculator & Token Cost Index
Compare verified API token costs ($/1M tokens), prompt caching discounts, context limits, and multi-agent inference spend across OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, and Meta.
| Model & Provider ⇅ | Input Cost ⇅ | Output Cost ⇅ | Prompt Caching | Context Window ⇅ | Latency / MMLU ⇅ | Action |
|---|
Simulate Your Monthly AI Infrastructure Bill
Adjust your expected token consumption and caching hit rate to see real-time cost projections and instant model arbitrage savings.
Compare Flagship AI Models Head-to-Head
Explore deep unit economics, prompt pricing breakdowns, benchmark scorecards, and recommended routing architectures.
The battle of frontier flagship models. Compare coding performance, vision precision, and Anthropic's 90% prompt caching advantage.
Can an open-weights 671B MoE beat OpenAI's lightweight champion on quality and price per million tokens?
Open reasoning vs proprietary RL. Discover how DeepSeek R1 matches o1 reasoning at 96% lower output cost ($2.19 vs $60.00).
High-speed agent loops compared. Analyze token speed, tool-calling precision, and Google's aggressive $0.10/1M pricing.
Ultra-fast LPU inference (280 t/s) vs full frontier multimodal. When to switch to open weights on dedicated LPUs.
Design your own multi-step agent workflow (LangGraph, CrewAI) with tool calls, retries, and vector database embeddings.
Serverless API vs Dedicated Cloud GPU Breakeven
When should you switch from pay-per-token serverless endpoints to renting dedicated H100 / A100 GPUs?
On-demand NVIDIA RTX 4090 and H100 SXM5 GPUs with vLLM endpoints. Perfect for Llama 3.3 70B & DeepSeek V3 at >100M tokens/mo.
Dedicated high-throughput endpoints with sub-millisecond TTFT, custom LoRA adapter switching, and 99.9% uptime SLA.
Deterministic low-latency LPU chips for instant real-time voice agents, search summarization, and high-frequency tool calling.
Bare-metal NVIDIA HGX H100 clusters with zero data egress fees and EU data sovereignty compliance.
Frequently Asked Questions on AI Token Economics
How does AI Price Calc obtain and verify token pricing?
Our pricing ingestion pipeline automatically synchronizes with official vendor pricing APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Cloud Vertex, DeepSeek, Mistral) and the open-source LiteLLM pricing registry on an hourly schedule. All data is verified for direct serverless API endpoints without third-party markups.
What is Prompt Caching and how does it reduce API bills?
Prompt Caching allows LLM providers to store frequent input prefixes (such as long system instructions, documentation, and database schemas) in memory. Anthropic offers up to a 90% discount on cached tokens, DeepSeek offers a 90% discount ($0.014/1M), and OpenAI offers a 50% discount on GPT-4o cached inputs.
What is the "Blended 3:1" Token Cost metric?
In standard production applications (such as RAG, summarization, and customer support bots), users typically send 3 input tokens for every 1 output token received. The Blended 3:1 rate is calculated as: (Input Price × 3 + Output Price × 1) / 4, providing a realistic cost benchmark per million tokens.
Why is DeepSeek V3 so significantly cheaper than GPT-4o?
DeepSeek V3 utilizes a Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) architecture combined with DeepSeekMoE (Mixture of Experts with 671B total parameters but only 37B active per token). This enables extreme GPU memory bandwidth efficiency, allowing DeepSeek to price inputs at $0.14/1M tokens while maintaining near-frontier benchmark scores.