Practical guides on model costs, token budgeting, and cutting your AI bill — written by someone who's actually done it.
By Gia Gray · Updated June 2026
The complete current per-million-token reference — GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro and more, all in one table. The 2024–2025 generation has been retired; start here for what's actually current.
Read the guide →What tokens actually are, why input costs 3–5× less than output, and how to turn "$2.50 per million tokens" into a real monthly cost estimate for your specific app.
Read the guide →GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.4 mini and legacy GPT-4o — which model is actually worth what it costs, when caching changes the math, and how the Batch API cuts your bill in half.
Read the guide →Claude's 90% prompt caching discount is the most aggressive in the industry — and most teams aren't using it. Here's the full breakdown of when Claude actually beats GPT-4o on cost.
Read the guide →The sticker prices say GPT-4o wins. The actual numbers across chatbot, RAG, document analysis, and content generation workloads are more complicated. See the math.
Read the guide →Google's Gemini Flash tiers run a fraction of GPT-4o's input cost. Here's where that holds up in production, where it doesn't, and when the 1M token context window actually changes your architecture.
Read the guide →Model tiering, prompt compression, caching, output length control, and batch processing — ranked by impact. I've seen teams go from $800 to $280/month in a week with these changes.
Read the guide →How to estimate your monthly AI costs before you ship — with a 3-scenario model, per-feature token budgets, and the unit economics check that tells you if your pricing makes sense.
Read the guide →Full GPT-4o cost breakdown — input, output, cached, and batch pricing — with monthly cost examples at different request volumes.
View pricing →Every major AI API ranked by cost per token — OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Updated June 2026.
See rankings →How AIModelCalc sources pricing data, handles caching discounts and batch rates, and how quickly we update when providers change rates.
Read methodology →Ready to run your own numbers? Enter your token estimates and compare every major model side by side.
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