Cost-to-Performance & Token Optimization

Cheapest AI Models

Ranked by input/output pricing per million tokens, prompt caching savings, and high-volume batch processing discounts.

Most Cost-Efficient API Models

Ranked by verified official input token cost per million tokens.

Google DeepMind Commercial API

Gemini 2.0 Flash

Google's high-speed multimodal workhorse with 1M token context, native tool use, and real-time audio/video streaming.

Context Window

1M tokens

Architecture / Params

Not Disclosed

textimageaudiovideo Tool Calling
Verified Benchmark Scores
LiveCodeBench48.0%
GPQA Diamond62.1%
MMLU-Pro74.8%
Input / Output

$0.10 / $0.40 / MTok

Full Dossier
Meta AI Open Weights

Llama 3.3 70B Instruct

Meta's open-weights 70B flagship matching Llama 3.1 405B capabilities on industry benchmarks at 1/5th the compute.

Context Window

128k tokens

Architecture / Params

70B

text Tool Calling Local VRAM
Verified Benchmark Scores
LiveCodeBench47.9%
GPQA Diamond52.8%
MMLU-Pro71.0%
Input / Output

$0.12 / $0.30 / MTok

Full Dossier
DeepSeek Open Weights

DeepSeek-V3

Frontier open-weights 671B MoE base and chat model with multi-head latent attention (MLA) and dual-pipe training.

Context Window

64k tokens

Architecture / Params

671B (37B active)

text Tool Calling Local VRAM
Verified Benchmark Scores
LiveCodeBench49.2%
GPQA Diamond59.1%
MMLU-Pro75.9%
Input / Output

$0.14 / $0.28 / MTok

Full Dossier
OpenAI Commercial API

GPT-4o mini

High-speed, ultra-affordable multimodal small model designed to replace GPT-3.5 Turbo at 60% lower cost.

Context Window

128k tokens

Architecture / Params

Not Disclosed

textimage Tool Calling
Verified Benchmark Scores
SWE-bench Verified20.2%
LiveCodeBench32.4%
GPQA Diamond40.2%
Input / Output

$0.15 / $0.60 / MTok

Full Dossier
Mistral AI Open Weights

Codestral 2501

Mistral AI's dedicated code generation model with 256k context window and fill-in-the-middle (FIM) capabilities.

Context Window

256k tokens

Architecture / Params

22B

text Tool Calling Local VRAM
Input / Output

$0.30 / $0.90 / MTok

Full Dossier
DeepSeek Open Weights

DeepSeek-R1

Open-weights frontier reasoning model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning without supervised cold start.

Context Window

64k tokens

Architecture / Params

671B (37B active)

text Reasoning Tool Calling Local VRAM
Verified Benchmark Scores
AIME (2024/2025)79.8%
SWE-bench Verified49.2%
LiveCodeBench65.9%
Input / Output

$0.55 / $2.19 / MTok

Full Dossier

Interactive Multi-Model Token Calculator

Token Cost Estimator

Calculate projected inference spend with prompt caching

Quick Workload Presets

Input Tokens / Req2,000
100100k200k
Output Tokens / Req500
5016k32k
Number of Requests1,000
125k50k
Cache Hit Rate0%
0% (No cache)50%90% (Max)
Total Input Spend

$0.2000

2.00M input tokens

Total Output Spend

$0.2000

0.50M output tokens

Estimated Total Cost

$0.40

Avg: $0.00040 / req

Rates: $0.10 in / $0.40 out per million tokens (Google AI Studio)Last verified: Aug 10, 2026

Token Pricing FAQ

Which frontier AI model has the lowest token pricing?

Gemini 2.0 Flash ($0.10/MTok input, $0.40/MTok output) and DeepSeek-V3 ($0.14/MTok input, $0.28/MTok output) currently offer the lowest official API pricing for frontier-class capabilities.

How does batch API pricing work?

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral offer 50% discounts on token rates for asynchronous queries submitted through their Batch API endpoints that complete within 24 hours.

Data Accuracy & Verification Notice

AI model specifications, pricing records, and benchmark metrics published on this platform are compiled directly from authoritative sources (official provider documentation, research papers, and verified evaluation harnesses). Benchmark results reflect specific test harnesses and prompting methodologies; scores are not directly comparable across differing evaluation setups.