LLM API Pricing 2026: Full Comparison Table (Weekly)

As of September 14, 2026, LLM API prices span two orders of magnitude — from $0.10 per million input tokens (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) to $30.00 (GPT-5.5-pro and GPT-5.4-pro). Forty-six of the 47 tracked rows did not move — a third consecutive week without a price change on the carried set. The single change is not a price cut. DeepSeek’s pricing page now states that v4-flash has been retired and that requests to that name are served by a different model, deepseek-flash, at $0.15 / $0.60.

The distinction matters because the numbers fell. Input went from $0.22 to $0.15, within a cent of the $0.14 DeepSeek charged before its August 17 increase. Output did not follow: $0.60 now, against $0.28 in that same pre-increase week. The August increase was reversed on input and kept on output, through a model swap rather than a repricing.

One ratio carries the whole story. Before August 17, DeepSeek charged 2x as much for output as for input. After the increase, 3x. Now 4x. Each step moved it further from the cheap-generation model it launched as, and closer to the 3–6x every other provider on this page charges. The cache column moved the opposite way: a hit now costs 2% of base input, a 98% discount that takes the deepest-cache title back from Claude Fable 5.1 one week after Anthropic took it.

Every price below was collected on September 14, 2026 directly from the six providers’ official pricing pages and normalized to USD per 1M tokens at the standard (non-batch) tier.

TL;DR

• Cheapest overall: Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10 / $0.40), still ahead of the cheaper DeepSeek row that arrived on September 14 at $0.15 / $0.60
• Best flagship value: GPT-5.6-sol at $4.00 / $20.00, but only through at least November 21. Claude Opus 5 at $5.00 / $25.00 remains the cheapest flagship rate with no expiry attached
• The deepest cache discount changed hands twice in eight days: DeepSeek’s new deepseek-flash bills a cache hit at 2% of base input — 98% off, retaking the lead from the 97.5% Claude Fable 5.1 held for one week
• Three promotional clocks now run: Gemini 3.8, 3.7 and 3.6 Flash are $0.75 / $3.75 only through 2026-12-31, then double; GPT-5.6-sol’s $4.00 / $20.00 holds through at least 2026-11-21
• Third straight week with no price move on the carried set: the only change is DeepSeek retiring v4-flash and serving the name from deepseek-flash. The tracked set holds at 47 — one row out, one row in

Methodology

All prices were collected on 2026-09-14 from official provider pricing pages only: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and Mistral. No aggregator data was used — aggregators serve as cross-checks, never as sources.

Every figure is normalized to USD per 1M tokens at the standard, non-batch, global-routing tier. For models with tiered long-context pricing (Google, xAI), the table records the base tier and footnotes the higher tier. Retired models are excluded; deprecated-but-available models are noted in the table footnotes.

Each collection run is stored as a dated snapshot in our internal time-series. That series is what makes the changelog at the bottom of this page — and future price-change history reporting — possible: official pricing pages only ever show the current price.

Flagship Models

These are the top-capability tiers each provider currently sells. Prices are input / output per 1M tokens; cache read is the discounted price for repeated (cached) input.

Model	Provider	Input $/1M	Output $/1M	Cache read $/1M	Context
Claude Fable 5.1	Anthropic	$10.00	$50.00	$0.25	1M
Claude Fable 5	Anthropic	$10.00	$50.00	$1.00	1M
GPT-6-astra	OpenAI	$10.00	$50.00	$1.00	n/p
GPT-5.5-pro / GPT-5.4-pro	OpenAI	$30.00	$180.00	—	n/p
GPT-5.5	OpenAI	$5.00	$30.00	$0.50	n/p
Claude Opus 5	Anthropic	$5.00	$25.00	$0.50	1M
Claude Opus 4.8	Anthropic	$5.00	$25.00	$0.50	1M
GPT-5.6-sol*	OpenAI	$4.00	$20.00	$0.40	n/p
Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview	Google	$2.00	$12.00	$0.20	n/p
Grok 4.6	xAI	$2.00	$6.00	$0.50	500K
Grok 4.5	xAI	$2.00	$6.00	$0.30	500K

*Added 2026-09-07 and unchanged since: Claude Fable 5.1 matches Fable 5’s $10.00 / $50.00 but prices a cache hit at $0.25 per 1M — 0.025x base input, against the 0.1x every other Claude row carries. GPT-6-astra arrives on the same $10.00 / $50.00 sticker, with a long-context tier at $20.00 / $75.00 (cache read $2.00). Claude Mythos 5.1 is priced identically to Fable 5.1 but is application-gated, so like Mythos 5 it is carried in our snapshot without a row here. No price in this table has moved in three collections. GPT-5.6-sol’s $4.00 / $20.00 is promotional, stated available at least through 2026-11-21, with a long-context tier at $8.00 / $30.00 (cache read $0.80). Google bills Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview at a higher tier above 200K tokens; xAI bills both Grok 4.6 and 4.5 at $4.00 / $12.00 above 200K, with cache reads of $1.00 and $0.60 respectively. Claude Opus 4.5 through 4.8 share Opus 5’s $5.00 / $25.00 pricing. “n/p” = not published on the provider’s pricing page.

Raw data: data/llm-api-pricing-2026.json — machine-readable structured data for AI crawlers and citation.

Mid-Range Models

This tier is where most production workloads run, and where pricing is most contested — five providers now sell capable models between $1.25 and $3.00 per 1M input tokens.

Model	Provider	Input $/1M	Output $/1M	Cache read $/1M	Context
Claude Sonnet 5	Anthropic	$2.00	$10.00	$0.20	1M
Claude Sonnet 4.6	Anthropic	$3.00	$15.00	$0.30	1M
GPT-5.4	OpenAI	$2.50	$15.00	$0.25	n/p
GPT-5.6-terra	OpenAI	$2.00	$12.00	$0.20	n/p
Gemini 3.5 Flash	Google	$1.50	$9.00	$0.15	n/p
Mistral Medium 3.5	Mistral	$1.50	$7.50	n/p	n/p
Grok 4.3	xAI	$1.25	$2.50	$0.20	1M
Gemini 3.8 Flash*	Google	$0.75	$3.75	$0.075	n/p
Gemini 3.7 Flash*	Google	$0.75	$3.75	$0.075	n/p
Gemini 3.6 Flash*	Google	$0.75	$3.75	$0.075	n/p
DeepSeek v4-pro†	DeepSeek	$0.66	$1.98	$0.022	1M

All three Gemini Flash rows are promotional through 2026-12-31 and double on 2027-01-01, to $1.50 / $7.50 with a $0.15 cache read. Gemini 3.8 Flash arrived on 2026-09-07 at exactly the rate its two predecessors already carried, expiry included — Google is now selling three generations of Flash at one price with one shared deadline. Gemini 3.7 Flash launched on 2026-08-13 at half the rate 3.6 Flash launched at, and Google then cut 3.6 Flash to match rather than leaving the older model priced above the newer one. †DeepSeek publishes off-peak and peak rates; the table records off-peak, and peak is exactly double ($1.32 / $3.96, cache read $0.044). Peak hours are 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC. v4-pro is the DeepSeek row that did *not change this week: its pricing page now states that API service continues past 2026-09-14 with billing unchanged, retiring a date that had been read as an end-of-life. Claude Sonnet 5’s $2.00 / $10.00 is no longer introductory — see the changelog. Grok 4.3 is billed at $2.50 / $5.00 above 200K tokens.

Budget Models

Below $1.00 per 1M input tokens, the spread between providers is wider than the spread between tiers — a 10x gap separates the cheapest and most expensive rows.

Model	Provider	Input $/1M	Output $/1M	Cache read $/1M	Context
Claude Haiku 4.5	Anthropic	$1.00	$5.00	$0.10	200K
GPT-5.4-mini	OpenAI	$0.75	$4.50	$0.075	n/p
Mistral Large 3	Mistral	$0.50	$1.50	n/p	n/p
Gemini 2.5 Flash	Google	$0.30	$2.50	$0.03	1M
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite	Google	$0.25	$1.50	$0.025	n/p
GPT-5.6-luna	OpenAI	$0.20	$1.20	$0.02	n/p
GPT-5.4-nano	OpenAI	$0.20	$1.25	$0.02	n/p
DeepSeek flash†	DeepSeek	$0.15	$0.60	$0.003	1M
Mistral Small 4	Mistral	$0.15	$0.60	n/p	n/p
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite	Google	$0.10	$0.40	$0.01	n/p

†This row changed identity on 2026-09-14. DeepSeek retired v4-flash (build V4-Flash-0731) and now serves that name from DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash under the id deepseek-flash; the legacy id is still accepted and billed at the new rate. Read the row as a substitution, not a 32% input cut — the product behind the earlier figures no longer exists. Peak rates are double ($0.30 / $1.20, cache read $0.006), with peak hours 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC. The new rate ties Mistral Small 4 to the cent on both input and output, and the two separate only on caching, which Mistral does not price at all. Mistral Large 3 still costs a third of the newer Mistral Medium 3.5 — Mistral has repositioned its former flagship as a budget option rather than retiring it. GPT-5.6-luna sits on exactly GPT-5.4-nano’s input and cache-read prices, so OpenAI sells two generations at an identical input cost and separates them only by a five-cent output difference.

Coding and Specialist Models

This tier shrank sharply in the week to 2026-08-17. Mistral’s pricing page no longer lists Magistral Medium, Magistral Small, Devstral 2, or Devstral Small 2, and its models overview gives retirement dates for all four running from 2025-10-31 to 2026-07-31. Four of the seven rows this section carried the week before were models Mistral had already withdrawn — a reminder that a pricing page is a better record of what exists than of what stopped existing.

Model	Provider	Input $/1M	Output $/1M	Context
Grok-build-0.1 (coding)	xAI	$1.00	$2.00	256K
Codestral (coding)	Mistral	$0.30	$0.90	n/p
Ministral 3 (3B / 8B / 14B)	Mistral	$0.10–0.20	$0.10–0.20	n/p

Grok-build-0.1 is billed at $2.00 / $4.00 above 200K tokens. Ministral 3 models are priced symmetrically (identical input and output rates), which is rare — output tokens typically cost 3–6x input. Ministral 3 sits outside the weekly-tracked snapshot set and is shown here for completeness of Mistral’s lineup, without week-over-week change tracking. Also newly on Mistral’s pricing page but outside the tracked set: Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 at $1.40 / $4.40, resold under Mistral’s API. It is the first third-party model to appear on a tracked provider’s own pricing page, and how to count it is an open question for this series rather than a settled one.

The Fine Print That Changes the Rankings

A per-token price table looks objective, but three structural details buried in provider documentation change what these numbers actually mean.

First, tokens are no longer a stable unit. Anthropic discloses that Claude Opus 4.7 and later, Sonnet 5, and Fable 5 use a new tokenizer that produces roughly 30% more tokens for the same text. That means Sonnet 5’s $2.00 input price is closer to an effective ~$2.60 per old-tokenizer-equivalent input, which erases most of its apparent advantage over GPT-5.4’s $2.50 — a gap the sticker prices hide entirely. No other provider publishes tokenizer efficiency data at all, which makes cross-provider per-token comparison an approximation, not an equivalence. This is why cost-per-task benchmarking is replacing cost-per-token math in serious procurement.

Second, the price war moved from base rates to cache reads — but not everywhere, and not permanently. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have all priced a cache read at 10% of base input, a flat 90% discount. Two vendors have now gone past it, and the lead between them changed twice in eight days.

On September 7 Anthropic broke its own flat rule: Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 bill cache hits at 0.025x base input, a 97.5% discount, while every older Claude model stays at 0.1x. That is a discount of unusual size sitting on the most expensive models a vendor sells rather than the cheapest — a shape that only makes sense if the buyer being courted is one whose bill is mostly re-sent context and who is not shopping on sticker price.

On September 14 DeepSeek took the title back at 98%, and it got there by a different route. Anthropic cut a multiplier. DeepSeek changed the model: deepseek-flash prices a cache hit at $0.003 against $0.15 base input, restoring roughly the 98% ratio v4-flash carried before August 17 and briefly lost. The competitive fact is that two vendors are now bidding on the cache column specifically, while the other four hold a flat 90% — and the vendor whose sticker price is near the bottom of the table and the vendor whose sticker price is at the top are the two doing it.

xAI shows the direction running both ways within one vendor. It cut Grok 4.5’s cache read from $0.50 to $0.30 between our July 16 and July 28 snapshots, deepening that discount from 75% to 85% while leaving the $2.00 base input untouched. Then on August 17 it launched Grok 4.6 at the same $2.00 base with a $0.50 cache read — reverting to the 75% discount for the newer model. If cache reads are where the competition is, xAI just made its newest model less competitive on exactly that axis.

For agentic workloads, where the same system prompt and tool definitions are re-sent on every call, cached input routinely dominates total token volume. In that regime, the cache-read column of the tables above predicts your bill better than the input column does. A provider with a higher base price and cheaper effective caching can win on real invoices.

The cache-read column alone does not settle it, though, because the write fee and the minimum cacheable prefix differ by vendor and neither appears in this table. We normalized those into an effective cost per hit rate in LLM Cache Pricing 2026, which is the companion to this page for anyone whose bill is mostly repeated input.

Third, pricing structure — flat versus tiered — is a strategic split, not an accounting detail. Anthropic explicitly bills its 1M-token context window at standard rates: a 900K-token request costs the same per token as a 9K one. Google and xAI took the opposite path, roughly doubling per-token rates above 200K tokens, and OpenAI crossed that line on August 24: GPT-5.6-sol now carries a long-context tier at $8.00 / $30.00.

That leaves Anthropic as the only one of the four still billing long context flat. Flat pricing sells predictability to agent builders whose context sizes vary wildly at runtime; tiered pricing protects margins on the expensive long-context serving path. Which structure wins will shape how retrieval-augmented and long-context architectures are designed, because a 2x cliff at 200K tokens is an architectural forcing function.

The Bigger Picture

The market is not uniformly deflating, and the week to August 17 exposed that “deflation” has been hiding two different things.

Two of the three price moves came with a clock attached. Google’s Gemini Flash rows are $0.75 / $3.75 only through December 31, 2026, and the pricing page already prints the January 1 rate beside it. Anthropic used the same instrument in the opposite direction, converting Sonnet 5’s introductory rate into the standard one and cancelling an increase it had pre-announced. Both are promotional pricing being managed. Neither says anything about what it costs to serve those models.

DeepSeek is the counterexample, and four weeks later it is a more complicated one than it looked. On August 17 it raised prices outright — 57% on v4-flash input, 136% on output — with no promotional clock and no pre-announced figure. We recorded that as a structural reprice. On September 14 it walked most of it back, but only on one axis and only by replacing the model.

The asymmetry is the finding. Input returned to within a cent of the pre-increase rate; output stayed at more than double it. Those two axes bill different workloads. Extraction, classification and retrieval are input-dominated and are close to their July prices again; generation and long-form reasoning are output-dominated and are paying the August increase in full. A vendor that needed margin on generation and not on ingestion would produce exactly this shape, and it is invisible in any table that quotes one blended price per model.

It also shows what a version bump can carry. Nothing on the page reads as a price change — the name that appears in customer code still resolves, and the invoice per token falls. What changed underneath is which model answers. A buyer tracking cost per token would log a discount here; a buyer tracking cost per task has to re-measure, because the thing being measured was replaced.

Frontier prices, meanwhile, keep rising — Fable 5 at $10 / $50, OpenAI’s pro tier at $30 / $180 — on the theory that frontier capability is price-inelastic. What is newly in question is the assumption underneath the rest of the table: that the commodity tier moves in one direction, and that a falling number means the same product got cheaper.

This matters beyond procurement because API pricing is becoming the cost structure of AI-mediated traffic itself. As we documented in our analysis of ChatGPT ads and AEO economics, AI answers are now a monetized distribution channel; the margin between what a model costs to run and what its answers earn determines which models power that channel. And token efficiency is not only a provider-side variable — vague prompts inflate token consumption and degrade output quality simultaneously, so prompt discipline compounds directly with the per-token rates in these tables.

How to Choose: Recommendations by Workload

High-volume extraction and classification. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10 / $0.40) holds the price floor among maintained models. The September 14 swap brought DeepSeek back to $0.15 / $0.60, a tie with Mistral Small 4 and 50% above Flash-Lite on input rather than the 120% the August increase had opened. For stateless pipelines Flash-Lite still wins on sticker price; DeepSeek’s 1M context and near-free cache reads make it the stronger pick as soon as documents repeat across requests.

Agentic workloads with heavy context reuse. Rank by cache-read price, not input price: DeepSeek flash ($0.003), Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.01), GPT-5.4-nano and GPT-5.6-luna ($0.02 each), Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.10). If your agent re-sends a 50K-token system prompt on every call, these numbers are your effective input price. DeepSeek’s September 14 swap restored a 3.3x lead over Flash-Lite here, up from the 1.4x it had been cut to in August — but the lead now belongs to a model that has been in the table for one week, not to the one that was benchmarked into these pipelines.

Long-context analysis. Claude Sonnet 5 ($2.00 / $10.00, flat 1M context) is the standout, and since August 17 it is no longer on a clock — flagship-adjacent quality, no long-context surcharge, and no scheduled increase. Grok 4.3 ($1.25 / $2.50 base, 1M) undercuts it on sticker price, but only if your prompts stay under the 200K-token cliff where xAI’s rates double.

Frontier reasoning. GPT-5.6-sol is the cheapest row in this tier at $4.00 / $20.00, and it is the first flagship price here that comes with an expiry date — OpenAI commits to it only through 2026-11-21. Claude Opus 5 ($5.00 / $25.00) is the value anchor if you are budgeting past that date, with Opus 4.5 through 4.8 at the same price for a pinned older revision. Claude Fable 5 ($10.00 / $50.00) prices above both; the pro-grade OpenAI models ($30.00 / $180.00) only make sense where a single hard task justifies a 6–7x premium over Opus 5. Budget the promotional rate as temporary unless your workload ends before November.

Limitations

• Standard tier only. Batch discounts (typically 50% off at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Mistral) and regional/data-residency surcharges (10% at OpenAI and Anthropic for US-only routing) are not baked into the tables.
• Context windows marked “n/p” are not published on the provider’s official pricing page; we do not fill gaps from third-party sources.
• Mistral does not publish cache-read pricing, so its rows cannot be compared on the caching dimension.
• Coverage is six providers (47 models tracked). The tables show the notable rows and footnote price-identical siblings, so the visible row count is lower than the tracked count. Open-source hosted inference (Groq, Together, DeepInfra) and Alibaba/Qwen are excluded from this edition; we would rather ship a fully verified narrow table than a broad one with stale rows.
• DeepSeek’s rows are off-peak rates and are not strictly comparable to the rest of the table. Every other provider publishes one rate that applies at all hours. DeepSeek publishes two, and a workload that runs during the 01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC peak windows pays exactly double the figures shown. We record the lower tier for consistency with how tiered pricing is handled elsewhere, not because it is the rate most users will pay.
• Prices are list prices. Enterprise volume discounts are negotiated and unobservable.

Update Cadence and Changelog

This table is refreshed weekly from the six official pricing pages, and every change lands here as a dated entry. Official pricing pages only show current prices — the change history below, and the snapshot series behind it, is what this page accumulates that they do not.

Date	Change
2026-09-14	DeepSeek retired v4-flash; the row was replaced, not repriced. The pricing page now lists deepseek-flash (build DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash) at $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak, cache read $0.003, and states that the legacy ids deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp are still accepted but that the models behind them have been retired, with those requests served and billed at the Flash rate. Against the rate v4-flash carried last week this is −31.8% on input, −9.1% on output and −57.1% on cache read; against the rate it carried before the 2026-08-17 increase it is +7% on input and +114% on output. The August increase was therefore reversed on input and kept on output, and DeepSeek’s output-to-input ratio went 2x (pre-August) to 3x to 4x across the three states. The 98% cache discount retakes the deepest-cache position from Claude Fable 5.1 eight days after Anthropic took it. No other row moved — a third consecutive collection with no price change on the carried set, across all six providers. Tracked set holds at 47: one out, one in. DeepSeek also states that v4-pro API service continues past 2026-09-14 with billing unchanged, cancelling a date that had been read as an end-of-life; v4-pro’s own prices are untouched. Two dated commitments still stand: GPT-5.6-sol through at least 2026-11-21, and the three Gemini Flash rows through 2026-12-31. Still outside the tracked set and unchanged: Mistral’s resale of Z.ai GLM 5.2 and the Ministral 3 line.
2026-09-07	No price change, four arrivals. All 43 rows carried over from 2026-09-01 hold their prices — a second consecutive collection with no move anywhere across the six providers. Tracked set 43 → 47. Added: Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 at $10.00 / $50.00, matching Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on base rates but pricing cache hits at 0.025x base input ($0.25 / 1M) against the 0.1x every other Claude model uses — the first split in Anthropic’s cache-read multiplier recorded in this series, and at 97.5% the deepest cache discount in these tables. Added: GPT-6-astra at $10.00 / $50.00 (cache read $1.00) with a $20.00 / $75.00 long-context tier, the most expensive OpenAI row outside the $30.00 / $180.00 pro tier. Added: Gemini 3.8 Flash at $0.75 / $3.75 (cache read $0.075) on the same 2026-12-31 introductory expiry as Gemini 3.7 and 3.6 Flash, taking the rows scheduled to double on 2027-01-01 from two to three. Nothing was removed. Collected Monday 2026-09-07, six days after the previous file rather than seven, because 2026-09-01 was collected on a Tuesday. Two dated commitments still stand: GPT-5.6-sol through at least 2026-11-21, and the three Gemini Flash rows through 2026-12-31. Still outside the tracked set and unchanged: Mistral’s resale of Z.ai GLM 5.2, the Ministral 3 line, and DeepSeek’s deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp.
2026-09-01	No change. All 43 tracked rows hold the prices recorded on 2026-08-24, across all six providers — the first collection in this series with no price move anywhere. No model entered or left the tracked set. Collected Tuesday 2026-09-01 rather than Monday; the 2026-08-31 slot was missed and is left as a gap rather than backfilled, so this entry covers eight days. Two dated commitments still stand on the pages: GPT-5.6-sol’s promotional rate through at least 2026-11-21, and the 2026-12-31 expiry on both Gemini Flash rows. Anthropic’s cancelled Sonnet 5 increase reached its 2026-09-01 date with the rate unmoved. Still outside the tracked set and unchanged: Mistral’s resale of Z.ai GLM 5.2 and the Ministral 3 line.
2026-08-24	OpenAI cut GPT-5.6-sol from $5.00 / $30.00 to $4.00 / $20.00 (cache read $0.50 → $0.40) — input −20%, output −33.3%, the largest single-model cut recorded here since the GPT-5.6-luna cut on 2026-08-03. The page marks the rate promotional and available at least through 2026-11-21, so it is recorded as a dated cut rather than a new standard price. The same model gained OpenAI’s first long-context tier at $8.00 / $30.00 (cache read $0.80); every other OpenAI row stays flat. GPT-5.6-terra and GPT-5.6-luna did not move, and no other provider changed a price. No models added or removed — tracked set holds at 43. Still outside the tracked set and unchanged from last week: Mistral’s resale of Z.ai GLM 5.2 ($1.40 / $4.40) and the Ministral 3 line. DeepSeek added deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp at v4-flash rates, excluded here as a non-text model.
2026-08-17	The largest week in the series. DeepSeek raised prices, the first increase recorded here from any provider: v4-flash $0.14 / $0.28 → $0.22 / $0.66 (cache read $0.0028 → $0.007) and v4-pro $0.435 / $0.87 → $0.66 / $1.98 (cache read $0.003625 → $0.022), all off-peak. This is the increase the 2026-08-10 entry flagged as expected but unsized. DeepSeek also shipped build V4-Pro-0813. Google halved Gemini 3.6 Flash to $0.75 / $3.75 (cache read $0.075) to match new arrival Gemini 3.7 Flash, launched 2026-08-13 at the same rate; both are promotional through 2026-12-31 and double on 2027-01-01. Anthropic cancelled the Claude Sonnet 5 increase — $2.00 / $10.00 is now the standard price and the 2026-09-01 move to $3.00 / $15.00 will not occur. Added: Gemini 3.7 Flash, Grok 4.6 ($2.00 / $6.00, cache read $0.50). Removed: Claude Opus 4.1, retired from the first-party API on 2026-08-05, and Magistral Medium, Magistral Small, Devstral 2, and Devstral Small 2, all absent from Mistral’s pricing page with retirement dates between 2025-10-31 and 2026-07-31. Those five had been carried in earlier snapshots after their retirement dates passed; the earlier files are left as collected rather than corrected. Tracked set: 46 → 43 models.
2026-08-10	No change. Every row in the tables above holds last week’s price, and no model entered or left the six providers’ pricing pages — the first flat week since the series began. Two things visible on the pages but not yet in the table: Anthropic’s Sonnet 5 introductory rate still expires 2026-08-31, and DeepSeek’s pricing page states that a significant increase is expected, without naming a date or a figure. Neither is recorded as a price until it takes effect.
2026-08-03	OpenAI cut two GPT-5.6 models: luna from $1.00 / $6.00 to $0.20 / $1.20 (−80%, cache read $0.10 → $0.02) and terra from $2.50 / $15.00 to $2.00 / $12.00 (−20%, cache read $0.25 → $0.20). Both were cross-verified against OpenAI’s models page before recording. No models added or removed; every other row across the six providers was unchanged. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite’s $0.03 cache read was recorded for the first time — a gap in the prior collection, not a price change.
2026-07-28	Added Claude Opus 5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash. Grok 4.5 cache read cut from $0.50 to $0.30 (−40%), the only base-table price change. DeepSeek’s legacy IDs retired on schedule. No snapshot was taken on 2026-07-20 or 2026-07-27; those two weeks are absent from the series and were not reconstructed.
2026-07-16	Initial 2026 edition: baseline of 39 models across 6 providers. Supersedes the March 2026 draft dataset.

FAQ: LLM API Pricing 2026

What is the cheapest LLM API in 2026?

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, at $0.10 input / $0.40 output per 1M tokens. DeepSeek is second at $0.15 / $0.60, tied with Mistral Small 4, after retiring v4-flash on September 14, 2026 and serving the name from deepseek-flash. That swap undid the August 17 increase on input but not on output, which is why DeepSeek is close to its old input price and nowhere near its old output price. It is cheapest of all on cached input at $0.003 per 1M — a 98% discount — so a workload that reuses context should be priced on the cache-read column rather than this one.

Is Claude Sonnet 5’s price going up on September 1, 2026?

No. Anthropic cancelled the increase. The $2.00 / $10.00 rate announced at launch as introductory is now the standard price, and the pricing page states plainly that the scheduled move to $3.00 / $15.00 will not occur. This page carried the September deadline as its most time-sensitive number for six weeks; it is gone. If you budgeted a 50% cost increase for Sonnet 5 workloads from September, that reserve can be released.

Why is Claude Fable 5.1’s cache read cheaper than Claude Opus 5’s?

Anthropic prices a cache hit as a multiplier on base input, and on September 7, 2026 it stopped using one multiplier for the whole line. Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 bill cache hits at 0.025x base input ($0.25 per 1M tokens); every other Claude model, Opus 5 included, stays at 0.1x. The result is that Anthropic’s most expensive models now carry its deepest cache discount, at 97.5%.

Are per-token prices directly comparable across providers?

Only approximately. Anthropic’s newest models tokenize the same text into roughly 30% more tokens than its earlier models, and other providers publish no tokenizer efficiency data at all. Two models with the same $/1M price can produce meaningfully different invoices for the same documents — compare cost per task when the decision matters.

Do these prices include long-context surcharges?

No — tables record base tiers. Google and xAI roughly double per-token rates for prompts above 200K tokens (footnoted per table), and OpenAI joined them on August 24: GPT-5.6-sol is billed at $8.00 / $30.00 on long context against a $4.00 / $20.00 base. OpenAI’s other rows remain flat. Anthropic bills its full 1M context at standard rates.

How often is this table updated?

Weekly, from official provider pages only, with every change recorded in the changelog above. Missed weeks are marked as gaps rather than back-filled: the 2026-07-20 and 2026-07-27 snapshots were not taken, and reconstructing them after the fact would put unobserved prices into a series whose whole value rests on every row having been read off a live page. The series began July 16, 2026 and compounds into a price-change history that current-price-only official pages do not offer.

Related Resources

• ChatGPT Ads 2026: AEO Traffic and Reddit Citations — the revenue side of the same equation: what AI-mediated answers earn
• GIGO Prompt Engineering: Why Vague Prompts Fail — cutting token waste at the prompt level compounds with every rate in this table