LLM API Pricing Comparison 2026: The Complete Buyer's Guide

Originally published on The Searchless Journal

Choosing an LLM API in 2026 is harder than ever. Not because the options are bad, but because the pricing landscape shifts weekly and the gap between frontier models and budget alternatives has widened dramatically. A model that costs $25 per million output tokens sits alongside one that costs $4.40 for similar quality on many tasks.

This guide breaks down current pricing across every major model, explains what drives real-world costs, and gives you a framework for choosing without overpaying.

Current LLM API Pricing (June 2026)

All prices are per million tokens. Input means tokens sent to the model. Output means tokens generated by the model. Cached input means tokens the model has seen recently and can reuse from cache.

Frontier Models

Value and Budget Models

Important Caveats

Pricing changes frequently. Providers offer volume discounts, committed-use pricing, and enterprise rates that differ significantly from list prices. The numbers above reflect public list pricing as of late June 2026. Always check the provider's pricing page before making purchasing decisions.

Cached input pricing deserves special attention. If your application sends the same system prompt or context repeatedly, cached input pricing can reduce effective costs by 80-90%. This is one of the most overlooked cost optimization strategies.

Understanding Real-World Costs

List pricing tells you the rate. It does not tell you what you will actually spend. Real-world costs depend on three factors that most buyers underestimate.

Factor One: Token Consumption Volume

Different models consume different amounts of tokens for the same task. GLM-5.2, in Snowflake's benchmark, averaged 99 tool runs per task and consumed 860 million tokens. Claude Opus 4.7 averaged 80 runs and consumed 439 million tokens for the same tasks. GLM was cheaper per token but used nearly twice as many tokens.

When comparing costs, multiply price by expected token volume for your specific workload. A cheaper model that uses 2x the tokens may cost more in practice.

Factor Two: Agentic Multiplier

For chatbot applications, token consumption is predictable. One user message in, one response out. A few thousand tokens per conversation.

For agentic applications, token consumption multiplies. An agent that plans, executes tool calls, reads results, and iterates might make 10-50 model calls per task. Each call includes growing context. A single complex task can consume 500K+ tokens across all calls.

The agentic multiplier turns small pricing differences into large cost differences. A $2 per million token difference becomes $1,000+ per day at scale.

Factor Three: Retry and Error Rates

Models that produce more errors require more retries. Each retry consumes tokens. A model with 95% first-attempt accuracy costs less in practice than a model with 80% first-attempt accuracy, even if the per-token price is higher, because the error-prone model requires more iterations.

This is why first-attempt accuracy benchmarks matter more than best-of-N accuracy for cost calculations. Snowflake found Opus at 53.7% first-attempt versus GLM at 47.6%. That 6-point gap translates to more retries and more tokens for GLM.

How to Choose: A Decision Framework

Step 1: Classify Your Workload

Simple Q&A and content generation. You need a model that produces good-quality text for straightforward tasks. No complex reasoning, no multi-step planning. Budget models like DeepSeek V4, Qwen 3, or Llama 4 are sufficient. Cost: $0.50-$1.50 per million output tokens.

Moderate reasoning and analysis. You need a model that can follow instructions, do basic analysis, and produce structured outputs. Mid-tier models like Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.7, or Mistral Large 3 work well. Cost: $3-$10 per million output tokens.

Complex reasoning and agentic workflows. You need a model that can plan, execute multi-step tasks, write code, and maintain coherence over long sessions. Frontier models like GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, or Gemini 3 Ultra are necessary. Cost: $12-$30 per million output tokens.

Step 2: Calculate Your Effective Cost

Estimate monthly token consumption based on expected usage. Multiply by the model's effective rate (adjusted for cached input where applicable). Add 20% for retries and inefficiency.

For example: A coding assistant making 50 tool calls per task, averaging 5,000 tokens per call, handling 1,000 tasks per month. Total output tokens: approximately 250 million. At Opus pricing ($25/M output): $6,250/month. At GLM pricing ($4.40/M output): $1,100/month. At DeepSeek pricing ($1.50/M output): $375/month.

Step 3: Factor in Quality Differences

Quality matters as much as cost. A model that costs half as much but requires twice as many tasks to be redone saves nothing. Evaluate models on your actual workload using your actual evaluation criteria.

Run a representative sample of tasks through each model you are considering. Measure outcomes. Calculate cost per successful outcome, not cost per token.

Step 4: Build for Flexibility

The pricing landscape changes constantly. Building your application around a single model creates vendor lock-in that becomes expensive when prices shift. Use abstraction layers that let you route requests to different models based on cost, quality requirements, and availability.

Cost Optimization Strategies

Implement prompt caching. If your application sends the same system prompt repeatedly, prompt caching reduces input costs dramatically. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all support some form of prompt caching. Savings can reach 80-90% on input costs for suitable workloads.

Route by complexity. Use a cheap model for initial triage. If the task is simple, the cheap model handles it. If complex, escalate to a frontier model. This routing strategy can cut total costs by 40-60% while maintaining quality on hard tasks.

Batch processing discounts. OpenAI and Anthropic offer batch API pricing at 50% of standard rates for non-real-time workloads. If your application can tolerate latency, batch processing is an easy way to halve costs.

Compress context aggressively. Summarize conversation history. Remove irrelevant tool outputs. Use structured formats instead of verbose prose. Every token saved on context is a token you do not pay for.

Monitor token consumption per feature. Tie token costs to specific features, users, or product lines. You cannot optimize what you cannot measure. Token cost dashboards should be as prominent as any other infrastructure metric.

The Bottom Line

The LLM market in 2026 offers unprecedented range in both quality and price. The gap between the most expensive frontier model ($30/M output) and the cheapest viable model ($0.90/M output) is 33x. That range did not exist a year ago.

Companies that treat model selection as a strategic decision, rather than defaulting to whatever model has the most buzz, will save enormous amounts of money. The discipline of evaluating models on actual workloads, tracking real token consumption, and building flexible architectures pays for itself within weeks.

The cheapest model is not always the right choice. The most expensive model is almost never the right choice for every task. The right choice is the model that delivers adequate quality at the lowest real-world cost for your specific workload.

Measure. Compare. Optimize. Repeat.