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Cheapest LLM APIs in 2026 — Ranked by Price Per Token

Every LLM API ranked by blended price per million tokens. Find the lowest-cost model for your use case across 200+ options.

What is the cheapest LLM API right now?

The cheapest LLM API is Japanese Stable Diffusion XL via Fireworks AI at $0.0001 per million tokens (blended rate). This ranking covers 200+ models across 23 providers, updated every 6 hours.

Open WeightModels you can self-hostFrontierTop-tier quality modelsChatConversational modelsEmbeddingText embedding models

All Models by Price

200 models
#ModelInputOutput
43Paddlepaddle Paddleocr VL
$0.020$0.020
12Qwen3 Embedding 0 6B Batch
$0.0050Free
29Qwen3 Reranker 0 6B
$0.010Free
31Qwen3 Embedding 4B Batch
$0.010Free
33Qwen3 Embedding 0 6B
$0.010Free
39Qwen3 Embedding 4B
$0.020Free
41Qwen3 Reranker 4B
$0.025Free
48Google: Gemma 3n 4B
4B
$0.020$0.040
6LFM2 24B A2B Preview
$0.0001$0.0005
37LiquidAI: LFM2-2.6B
6B
$0.012$0.024
38LiquidAI: LFM2-8B-A1B
8B
$0.012$0.024
24Meta: Llama 3.2 1B Instruct
1BOpen
$0.0050$0.010
42Meta: Llama 3.2 3B Instruct
3BOpen
$0.020$0.020
7Flux 1 Schnell Fp8
$0.0003$0.0003
8Flux 1 Dev Fp8
$0.0005$0.0005
9Flux 1 Dev Controlnet Union
$0.0010$0.0010
46Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct Turbo
$0.020$0.030
49Meta Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
8B
$0.020$0.050
47Mistralai Mistral Nemo Instruct 2407
$0.020$0.040
50Mistral: Mistral Nemo
Open
$0.024$0.048
10Embeddinggemma 300M
$0.0020Free
1Japanese Stable Diffusion XL
$0.0001$0.0001
40Text Embedding 3 Small
$0.020Free
13Intfloat E5 Base V2
$0.0050Free
23Together AI Embedding UP TO 150M
$0.0080Free
26Intfloat E5 Large V2
$0.010Free
28Intfloat Multilingual E5 Large
$0.010Free
36Together AI Embedding 151M TO 350M
$0.016Free
44Multilingual E5 Large Instruct
$0.020$0.020
2Playground V2.1024px Aesthetic
$0.0001$0.0001
4Playground V2.5 1024px Aesthetic
$0.0001$0.0001
3Ssd 1B
$0.0001$0.0001
14Thenlper Gte Base
$0.0050Free
34Thenlper Gte Large
$0.010Free
21Baai Bge Base EN V1 5
$0.0050Free
25Baai Bge EN Icl
$0.010Free
27Baai Bge Large EN V1 5
$0.010Free
30Baai Bge M3 Multi
$0.010Free
32Baai Bge M3
$0.010Free
35Baai Bge Reranker V2 M3
$0.010$0.010
5Stable Diffusion XL 1024
$0.0001$0.0001
11Sentence Transformers All Mpnet Base V2
$0.0050Free
15Sentence Transformers All Minilm L12 V2
$0.0050Free
16Sentence Transformers Clip Vit B 32 Multilingual V1
$0.0050Free
17Sentence Transformers Clip Vit B 32
$0.0050Free
18Sentence Transformers Paraphrase Minilm L6 V2
$0.0050Free
20Sentence Transformers Multi QA Mpnet Base Dot V1
$0.0050Free
22Sentence Transformers All Minilm L6 V2
$0.0050Free
19Shibing624 Text2vec Base Chinese
$0.0050Free
45meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Turbo
$0.020$0.030

* Prices include ~20% OpenRouter platform fee (verified against actual billing).

Frequently Asked Questions

The cheapest LLM API is Japanese Stable Diffusion XL via Fireworks AI at $0.0001 per million tokens. Prices are compared using a blended rate (3:1 input-to-output ratio) across 200+ models.