LLM API prices fell roughly 80% between early 2025 and early 2026, and the gap between the cheapest and most expensive current models is enormous — over 1,400x on a per-token basis. Before building our AI token cost calculator, we looked at how existing tools in this space present that comparison, and at a catch several of them don't surface clearly.
Cheaper per token doesn't always mean cheaper per task
Databricks research cited by The Register found that in about a third of model comparisons tested, the model with the lower listed price ended up costing more overall — in one case, a model listed 80% cheaper per token turned out 38% more expensive across real tasks, because it needed more retries, more billed reasoning tokens, or longer outputs to produce a usable result. Our calculator only estimates the straightforward per-token math — we've said so directly in the tool itself, rather than implying it captures the full picture.
What this tool does differently on the "how current is this" question
Several existing AI pricing calculators advertise that they scrape provider pricing pages daily. We don't do that: this site's tools run entirely in your browser and don't call third-party APIs at runtime, by design (no server-side data collection to build or maintain). Instead, our pricing table is a dated snapshot — currently September 3, 2026 — sourced directly from provider documentation, and the tool says so plainly rather than implying a freshness it can't back up. For a decision involving real spend, especially at volume, check the provider's own pricing page first.
Eight models, one comparison
The calculator covers current pricing from Anthropic (Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 5, Opus 5, and Fable 5.1), OpenAI (GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.6 Sol), Google (Gemini 3.1 Pro), and Amazon (Nova Micro) — spanning $0.035 to $50 per million tokens depending on model and direction. Paste a prompt to estimate its input token count (a rough ≈4-characters-per-token approximation, not an exact tokenizer), enter your expected output length, and see estimated cost across all eight side by side.
Try the AI token cost calculator →
Sources: 80% price decline and cheap-tier model pricing via aggregate reporting on 2025–2026 API pricing trends; per-token vs. per-task cost gap via The Register, citing Databricks research; Claude pricing via Anthropic's official pricing docs; other model pricing aggregated via IntuitionLabs and BenchLM.ai — all as of 2026-09-03; verify against each provider's current pricing page before committing spend.
