LLM API Pricing Comparison

Q: What is the cheapest LLM API provider?

The cheapest LLM API provider depends on the model. SectorHQ tracks pricing across 23+ providers including DeepInfra, Together AI, Groq, and OpenRouter, updated every 6 hours.

Q: How much does GPT-4o cost per token?

GPT-4o costs $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens from OpenAI. Third-party providers may offer different rates.

Q: What is blended price per million tokens?

Blended price is a weighted average: (3 × input price + 1 × output price) / 4 per million tokens. It approximates typical usage where input tokens outnumber output tokens roughly 3:1.

Question 1

What is the cheapest LLM API in 2026?

Answer

The cheapest LLM API is Japanese Stable Diffusion XL via Fireworks AI at $0.0001 per million tokens (blended rate). Prices are tracked across 23 providers and updated every 6 hours.

Question 2

What is the cheapest LLM API provider?

Answer

The cheapest LLM API provider changes frequently as companies compete on price. SectorHQ tracks pricing across 23+ providers including DeepInfra, Together AI, Groq, and OpenRouter. Our cheapest model leaderboard shows the lowest-cost option for each model, updated every 6 hours from live API data.

Question 3

How much does GPT-4o cost per token?

Answer

GPT-4o pricing varies by provider. OpenAI charges $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens. Third-party providers like Azure and OpenRouter may offer different rates. Use our bill estimator to calculate exact monthly costs based on your usage.

Question 4

What is a value score for LLM pricing?

Answer

Value score measures quality-per-dollar for an LLM. It's calculated as (Arena ELO / 1000) / blended price per million tokens. A higher value score means you get more quality for less money. Models with high ELO scores and low prices rank highest.

Question 5

How often are LLM prices updated on SectorHQ?

Answer

LLM pricing data is collected every 6 hours from 4 sources: OpenRouter API, DeepInfra API, Together AI API, and the LiteLLM community database. Daily snapshots are created for historical tracking. Price change alerts are generated automatically when significant changes are detected.

Question 6

What is blended price per million tokens?

Answer

Blended price is a weighted average calculated as (3 × input price + 1 × output price) / 4 per million tokens. This approximates typical API usage where input tokens outnumber output tokens roughly 3:1. It provides a single comparable number across models and providers.

#	Model	Provider	Input	Output	Blended	Quality	Value	Added↓
1	Japanese Stable Diffusion XL	Fireworks AI	$0.0001	$0.0001	$0.0001	—	—	Feb 23
2	Playground V2.1024px Aesthetic	Fireworks AI	$0.0001	$0.0001	$0.0001	—	—	Feb 23
3	Ssd 1B	Fireworks AI	$0.0001	$0.0001	$0.0001	—	—	Feb 23
4	Playground V2.5 1024px Aesthetic	Fireworks AI	$0.0001	$0.0001	$0.0001	—	—	Feb 23
5	Stable Diffusion XL 1024	Fireworks AI	$0.0001	$0.0001	$0.0001	—	—	Feb 23
7	Flux 1 Schnell Fp8	Fireworks AI	$0.0003	$0.0003	$0.0003	—	—	Feb 23
8	Flux 1 Dev Fp8	Fireworks AI	$0.0005	$0.0005	$0.0005	—	—	Feb 23
9	Flux 1 Dev Controlnet Union	Fireworks AI	$0.0010	$0.0010	$0.0010	—	—	Feb 23
6	LFM2 24B A2B Preview	Together AI	$0.0001	$0.0005	$0.0002	—	—	Feb 23
10	Embeddinggemma 300M	Deepinfra	$0.0020	—	$0.0015	—	—	Feb 23
11	Sentence Transformers All Mpnet Base V2	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
12	Qwen3 Embedding 0 6B Batch	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	Good	304.0	Feb 23
13	Intfloat E5 Base V2	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
14	Thenlper Gte Base	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
15	Sentence Transformers All Minilm L12 V2	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
16	Sentence Transformers Clip Vit B 32 Multilingual V1	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
17	Sentence Transformers Clip Vit B 32	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
18	Sentence Transformers Paraphrase Minilm L6 V2	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
19	Shibing624 Text2vec Base Chinese	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23
20	Sentence Transformers Multi QA Mpnet Base Dot V1	Deepinfra	$0.0050	—	$0.0037	—	—	Feb 23

Provider	Models↓	Avg Input	Avg Output	Cheapest	Tier	SectorHQ Rank
OpenRouter 11 free	311	$1.90	$7.46	—	Mid-range	—
Fireworks AI	258	$0.477	$0.641	$0.0001	Budget	—
Deepinfra	211	$0.489	$1.77	$0.0015	Budget	#136
AWS Bedrock	157	$2.40	$6.53	$0.040	Mid-range	—
Azure OpenAI	137	$27.49	$84.55	$0.015	Premium	—
Together AI	89	$2.73	$1.01	$0.0002	Mid-range	#130
Novita AI	87	$0.303	$0.934	$0.010	Budget	—
OpenAI	86	$9.23	$28.68	$0.015	Premium	#1
Google Vertex AI	64	$1.90	$8.72	$0.125	Mid-range	—
Google	51	$0.855	$4.79	$0.113	Mid-range	#2
Replicate	42	$1.59	$6.69	$0.085	Mid-range	#148
Mistral AI	41	$0.928	$2.68	$0.075	Mid-range	#13
xAI	32	$1.71	$7.86	$0.275	Mid-range	#10
Perplexity	25	$0.837	$2.54	$0.070	Mid-range	#18
Anthropic	19	$5.90	$29.49	$0.500	Premium	#3
Cohere	17	$6.53	$2.11	$0.075	Premium	#162
SambaNova	16	$1.45	$8.63	$0.050	Mid-range	#261
AI21 Labs	12	$3.08	$5.17	$0.250	Mid-range	—
Alibaba Cloud	11	$0.509	$1.95	$0.087	Budget	—
Groq	10	$0.272	$0.658	$0.058	Budget	#225
Cerebras	8	$0.900	$1.22	$0.100	Budget	#32
DeepSeek	6	$0.300	$0.802	$0.175	Budget	#16
Cloudflare	4	$1.92	$1.92	$1.92	Mid-range	#25

LLM API Pricing Comparison

What is the cheapest LLM API in 2026?

Newest Models

Provider Leaderboard

Recent Price Changes

Frequently Asked Questions