THE TICKER · CHECKED DAILY · LAST CHANGE 2026-07-11
AI API PRICING
What 12 frontier models actually charge, in USD per million tokens. The same request costs 163x more on Claude Fable 5 than on DeepSeek V4 Flash. Most teams never look. You are looking.
METHODOLOGY: effective public price — promos included — verified daily against the LiteLLM community dataset with per-model pinned keys and sanity guards (a claimed 3x+ overnight change gets human review, not autopilot). Your negotiated rates may differ. Caching, batch and long-context tiers not included.
THE BOARD
EVERY HEAD-TO-HEAD →| Model | Input / MTok | Output / MTok | Output multiple | 1K prompt + 3K reply |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 Anthropic → | $10.00 | $50.00 | 5.0x | $0.16 |
| Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic → | $5.00 | $25.00 | 5.0x | $0.08 |
| GPT-5.6 OpenAI → | $5.00 | $30.00 | 6.0x | $0.10 |
| GPT-5.5 OpenAI → | $5.00 | $30.00 | 6.0x | $0.10 |
| GPT-5.4 OpenAI → | $2.50 | $15.00 | 6.0x | $0.05 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 Anthropic → | $2.00 | $10.00 | 5.0x | $0.03 |
| Gemini 3.1 Pro Google → | $2.00 | $12.00 | 6.0x | $0.04 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Google → | $1.50 | $9.00 | 6.0x | $0.03 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic → | $1.00 | $5.00 | 5.0x | $0.02 |
| Gemini 3 Flash Google → | $0.500 | $3.00 | 6.0x | $0.0095 |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek → | $0.435 | $0.870 | 2.0x | $0.0030 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash DeepSeek → | $0.140 | $0.280 | 2.0x | $0.0010 |
“Output multiple” is what a token costs leaving the model vs. entering it — the reason verbose answers hurt more than verbose questions. The last column prices a 1,000-token prompt with a 3,000-token reply (editorial assumption, same as the calculator's prompt profile).
PRICE CHANGE LOG
The ticker goes live. Prices checked daily against public list prices from here on.
Every applied change lands here automatically the day the daily check catches it. No entry, no change — silence is also data.
USE THE DATA
The whole board plus the changelog, as JSON, free, no key, no rate limit worth mentioning. Updated on every price change. If you use it somewhere public, link back — that's the entire license.
curl -s https://tokenburnindex.com/pricing.json
Schema: { updated, unit, criteria, models[], changelog[] } — prices in USD per 1M tokens.
PRICES ARE HALF THE STORY
The other half is how many tokens you burn to get an answer. Paste a prompt into the Burn Calculator to see what it costs on every model above — or check what your habits rank on the Burn Index.