💰 AI Pricing & Cost

195 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

📊 Pricing Comparisons (59)

GPT Image 2.6: Sunburst vs Flare, API Pricing, SVG and GIF

GPT Image 2.6 Sunburst and Flare API guide: model IDs, token prices, complexity versus quality, SVG/

 Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Sonnet 5: Pricing, API and Migration

Compare Claude Sonnet 5.5 with Sonnet 5 on pricing, context, tools, thinking behavior, benchmarks an

 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

💸 Budget & Cheap Options (44)

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,

 Ollama Context Limits: Keep Instructions, Evidence and Output in Budget

Diagnose oversized or truncated Ollama requests, inspect effective context and reduce application in

 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

⚡ Cost Optimization (39)

GitHub Agentic Workflows: Setup, Security and Running Costs

A developer guide to GitHub Agentic Workflows: Markdown sources, compiled Actions files, engines, pe

 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

📖 API Pricing Guides (53)

LFM3-1.7B: Local Setup, Hardware, API Pricing and Limits

LiquidAI LFM3-1.7B explained: local runtimes, 256K context, hosted pricing, commercial license condi

 Tencent Hy4: API Access, Pricing, Vision and Open-Weight Status

Tencent Hy4 API access and model identity, 1M context, vision and tool workflows, route pricing and

GitHub Copilot Fusion: Routing, Effort Levels and Billing

How Copilot Fusion routes models, what Standard, High and Max change, how billing works, and why exp