AI API Pricing Calculator (2026): Compare Model Costs by Workload
AI API Pricing Calculator
Monthly Cost Calculator
Estimate spend across major AI model APIs with one workload baseline. Prices last synced 2026-03-30, validated Mar 30, 2026. Verify against provider pricing pages before shipping billing logic.
How to use these sliders
Input ratio controls how many tokens are prompt/context tokens vs output tokens. Cached input ratio controls how much of those input tokens can use the lower cached-input price.
Example: with 1,000 tokens per message, 75% input means 750 input tokens and 250 output tokens. If cached input is 45%, then about 338 input tokens use cached pricing.
Estimated monthly spend
$4.87
Based on GPT-5.4 indicative token rates.
Best for: High-quality reasoning agents and premium customer support flows.
Input cost
$1.12
0.75M input tokens
Output cost
$3.75
0.25M output tokens
Cached input
0.34M
Applied at cached token pricing when available
Model cost ranking
| Provider | Model | Best for | Monthly cost | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Bedrock | Amazon Nova Micro | Very low-cost AWS-native high-volume assistant traffic. | $0.06 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite (batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $0.07 | Estimated |
| Cohere | Command R | Lightweight enterprise assistants with strong retrieval grounding. | $0.07 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $0.07 | Estimated |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.0 Flash (batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $0.08 | Estimated |
| Mistral | Ministral 3 3B | Low-cost production chat and extraction at scale. | $0.10 | Estimated |
| AWS Bedrock | Amazon Nova Lite | AWS-native stacks with centralized Bedrock governance. | $0.11 | Verified |
| Mistral | Mistral Small 3.2 | Budget-first automation pipelines and compact production assistants. | $0.11 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.0 Flash (standard) | Fast multimodal app features and responsive production assistants. | $0.11 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite (standard) | Very low-cost, high-throughput chat and extraction pipelines. | $0.13 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (standard) | Very low-cost, high-throughput chat and extraction pipelines. | $0.14 | Verified |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (standard) | Very low-cost, high-throughput chat and extraction pipelines. | $0.14 | Verified |
| Mistral | Mistral Small Creative | Budget-first automation pipelines and compact production assistants. | $0.15 | Verified |
| Mistral | Ministral 3 14B | Low-cost production chat and extraction at scale. | $0.20 | Estimated |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite (priority) | Latency-critical premium Google Cloud deployments. | $0.26 | Estimated |
| xAI | Grok 4.1 Fast Reasoning | Ultra-low-cost, high-throughput conversational endpoints. | $0.28 | Verified |
| xAI | Grok 4.1 Fast Non-Reasoning | Ultra-low-cost, high-throughput conversational endpoints. | $0.28 | Verified |
| DeepSeek | deepseek-chat | Budget-first automation pipelines and coding helpers. | $0.38 | Verified |
| OpenAI | GPT-5.4 nano | Ultra-low-cost classification, tagging, and lightweight automation. | $0.40 | Verified |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Flash (flex batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $0.43 | Estimated |
| Azure OpenAI | GPT-5-mini Global | Balanced assistants and production chat at moderate cost. | $0.61 | Needs review |
| Perplexity | Sonar | Search-augmented assistants and answer engines. | $0.68 | Verified |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Flash (standard) | Fast multimodal app features and responsive production assistants. | $0.76 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Flash (standard) | Fast multimodal app features and responsive production assistants. | $0.77 | Verified |
| Mistral | Mistral Medium 3.1 | Cost-efficient extraction and multilingual production assistants. | $0.80 | Verified |
| DeepSeek | deepseek-reasoner | Budget reasoning workflows and cost-aware analysis agents. | $0.82 | Needs review |
| Anthropic | Claude Haiku 3.5 | Fast, efficient support bots and high-volume text transformations. | $1.36 | Estimated |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Flash (priority) | Latency-critical premium Google Cloud deployments. | $1.36 | Estimated |
| AWS Bedrock | Amazon Nova Pro | Higher-quality AWS-native copilots with managed platform controls. | $1.40 | Verified |
| OpenAI | GPT-5.4 mini | Balanced assistants and production chat at moderate cost. | $1.46 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Pro (batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $1.55 | Estimated |
| Anthropic | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Fast, efficient support bots and high-volume text transformations. | $1.70 | Verified |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Pro (flex batch) | Large offline workloads where throughput cost matters most. | $1.72 | Estimated |
| AWS Bedrock | Amazon Nova Pro (Latency Optimized) | Higher-quality AWS-native copilots with managed platform controls. | $1.75 | Estimated |
| Mistral | Magistral Medium 1.2 | Cost-efficient extraction and multilingual production assistants. | $2.75 | Estimated |
| Mistral | Mistral Large 3 | Low-cost production chat and extraction at scale. | $3.00 | Verified |
| Mistral | Mistral Large 2.1 | Low-cost production chat and extraction at scale. | $3.00 | Verified |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Pro (standard) | Balanced quality/price workloads and multimodal app features. | $3.06 | Verified |
| Azure OpenAI | GPT-5 Codex Global | Coding copilots, refactors, and engineering automation in Azure stacks. | $3.06 | Needs review |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Pro (standard) | Balanced quality/price workloads and multimodal app features. | $3.06 | Verified |
| Perplexity | Sonar Reasoning Pro | Search-augmented assistants for high-quality answer generation. | $3.50 | Verified |
| Perplexity | Sonar Deep Research | Research workflows that require citations and deeper answer planning. | $3.50 | Verified |
| Cohere | Command A | Enterprise RAG and command-style business copilots. | $4.38 | Verified |
| Cohere | Command R+ | High-recall enterprise retrieval and grounded QA workloads. | $4.38 | Verified |
| OpenAI | GPT-5.4 | High-quality reasoning agents and premium customer support flows. | $4.87 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Long-context assistants with strong instruction following. | $5.09 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Long-context assistants with strong instruction following. | $5.09 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 4 | Long-context assistants with strong instruction following. | $5.09 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Sonnet 3.7 | Long-context assistants with strong instruction following. | $5.09 | Needs review |
| Vertex AI | Gemini 2.5 Pro (priority) | Latency-critical premium Google Cloud deployments. | $5.51 | Estimated |
| xAI | Grok 4.20 Reasoning | Reasoning-heavy assistants and premium chat experiences. | $6.00 | Verified |
| xAI | Grok 4.20 Non-Reasoning | Reasoning-heavy assistants and premium chat experiences. | $6.00 | Verified |
| Perplexity | Sonar Pro | Search-augmented assistants for high-quality answer generation. | $6.00 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.6 | Complex reasoning, long-form analysis, and high-stakes outputs. | $8.48 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.5 | Complex reasoning, long-form analysis, and high-stakes outputs. | $8.48 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.1 | Complex reasoning, long-form analysis, and high-stakes outputs. | $25.44 | Verified |
| Anthropic | Claude Opus 4 | Complex reasoning, long-form analysis, and high-stakes outputs. | $25.44 | Verified |
How these costs are calculated
Token prices come from our official baseline dataset and are validated against external sources when available. The calculator then applies your workload inputs (messages, tokens/message, input/output split, and cached-input ratio) to estimate monthly spend.
Source of truth: ai-provider-pricing-normalized-all-models.json → validated output: ai-provider-pricing-validated.json.
Disclaimer: pricing can change at any time across providers, tiers, and regions. We update this dataset regularly, but you should always confirm final numbers on official provider pricing pages before billing decisions.
External validation sources: OpenRouter API, PricePerToken, and Helicone LLM Cost. Availability and formats may vary over time.
Supported AI providers
OpenAI
Anthropic
Google Gemini
Mistral
Cohere
xAI
Perplexity
DeepSeek
AWS Bedrock
Azure OpenAI
Vertex AI
Meta / Llama API(roadmap)Embed
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What this calculator does
This calculator helps you estimate monthly AI API spend from a single workload baseline: messages per month, average tokens per message, input/output split, and cache ratio.
It is designed to compare providers quickly before you lock in model routing logic.
Data source and pricing model
The calculator reads its live model list from ai-provider-pricing-validated.json — a dataset validated against OpenRouter and third-party aggregators to ensure pricing accuracy.
Each model also includes a short Best for note to speed up model selection beyond pure token price.
How to use it
- Pick a model from the selector.
- Set your monthly messages and average tokens per message.
- Adjust input ratio and cached input ratio.
- Review estimated monthly cost and compare all models in the table.
The result is directional and should be validated against each provider billing page before production rollout.
Need help choosing the right AI model mix?
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Book a Free Strategy CallCite this article
- Title: AI API Pricing Calculator (2026): Compare Model Costs by Workload
- Author: Nicola Lazzari
- Published: March 27, 2026
- Updated: March 2026
- URL: https://nicolalazzari.ai/articles/ai-api-pricing-calculator-2026
- Website: nicolalazzari.ai
- Suggested citation: Nicola Lazzari. AI API Pricing Calculator (2026): Compare Model Costs by Workload. nicolalazzari.ai, updated March 2026.
Sources used
Primary sources
- Validated pricing dataset (JSON): https://nicolalazzari.ai/ai-provider-pricing-validated.json
AI-Readable Summary
- Interactive calculator for monthly AI API spend using one workload baseline.
- Compares multiple providers and models, including cache-aware pricing behavior.
- Model entries include a short best-fit explanation to support routing decisions.
Key takeaway: Interactive calculator for monthly AI API spend using one workload baseline.
Updated
March 2026
Topic
AI API Pricing Calculator (2026): Compare Model Costs by Workload
Audience
Developers, founders, product teams
Updated for March 2026 pricing and implementation context.
This article may be referenced in research, documentation, or AI datasets. Please cite the original source when possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
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