💰 AI Pricing & Cost

182 articles. Compare AI model pricing, optimize API costs, and find free tiers. Cost calculators and budget guides.

AI API pricing changes constantly, and the sticker price rarely tells the whole story once you factor in caching discounts, peak/off-peak rates, and how many tokens a model actually burns per task. This hub collects our pricing comparisons, budget-tier recommendations, and cost-optimization guides in one place, so you can figure out what a model will actually cost you before you commit. Pricing figures are sourced from each provider's own documentation and updated when providers change their rates — several articles below have already been corrected once a "permanent" price turned out not to be. If you're trying to control a growing API bill or pick the cheapest model that's still good enough for your use case, this is the right starting point.

Where to look

Comparing providers head-to-head — Pricing Comparisons.
Minimizing cost above all else — Budget & Cheap Options.
Already committed to a provider, want to spend less — Cost Optimization (caching, batching, model routing).
Setting up billing or API access for the first time — API Pricing Guides.

📊 Pricing Comparisons (57)

GPT-6 Sol vs Claude Opus 5.5: Pricing, Caching and Agent Tradeoffs

Compare GPT-6 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5 for coding agents, API costs, prompt caching, long context, Co

Railway vs Render for AI Applications: Pricing and Tradeoffs

Compare Railway and Render for AI APIs, workers, databases, cron jobs, scaling, observability and pr

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs Gemini 3.8 Flash: Coding, Agents and API Cost

Compare DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Gemini 3.8 Flash for coding and agents, including pricing structure,

💸 Budget & Cheap Options (45)

GPT-6 Luna Guide: The Cheapest GPT-6 Model for High-Volume Work

GPT-6 Luna costs $0.10/M input and $0.50/M output with 1.05M context. Learn its long-context, Batch,

I Used MiMo Code for a Week — The Free CLI Agent With Persistent Memory

Week 18 of my AI tool series. MiMo Code is Xiaomi's free CLI agent with 82% SWE-bench and memory tha

How to Run FLUX Locally: Generate AI Images for Free on Your GPU (2026)

Step-by-step guide to running FLUX image generation locally. VRAM requirements, ComfyUI setup, speed

⚡ Cost Optimization (38)

AI Dev Weekly #26: Agents API, Full-Duplex Voice, SWE-2 and Cost-Aware Copilot

Week of Sep 11-17: OpenAI's managed Agents API and GPT-Live-1 reach developers, Cognition ships SWE-

Cognition SWE-2 Explained: Benchmarks, Cost and Devin Access

Cognition SWE-2 reaches 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main. See its vendor benchmarks, Devin access, cos

AI Dev Weekly #24: Gemini 3.8 Flash Goes GA, Fable 5.1 Cuts Agent Cache Costs, Agent Plugins 1.0 Ships

Week of Aug 28-Sep 3: Gemini 3.8 Flash reaches production, Claude Fable 5.1 changes agent economics,

📖 API Pricing Guides (42)

Claude Opus 5.5 Guide: Pricing, Fast Mode and Opus 5 Migration

Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4/M input and $20/M output, adds cheaper cache reads, preserved thinking and

GPT-6 Sol Guide: API Pricing, Context and Coding Use Cases

GPT-6 Sol costs $2/M input and $10/M output, supports 1.05M context and targets balanced coding and

Grok 4.7 Complete Guide: API Pricing, 500K Context and Grok 4.7 Fast

Grok 4.7 API pricing, 500K context, reasoning levels, rate limits, Copilot availability, and how Gro