Decision-grade AI pricing
Turn messy public AI pricing into a shortlist a budget owner can defend.
Rank providers and model routes for your workload, account for visible add-on pressure, and turn the result into a shareable decision memo instead of a raw price table.
- Top 5 shortlist
- Hidden-fee pressure
- Permalink report
Usage drivers
Model the cost shape you expect in production, not the smallest demonstration workload.
Decision constraints
These preferences steer the ranking when public list prices are close.
Prefer provider-native tools
Enable this to favor direct routes with first-party search, grounding, OCR, or similar managed tools.
Flow
Guided buyer inputs
- Pick the buying intent and workload family.
- Enter the usage pattern that really drives cost.
- Apply route, lock-in, and budget constraints.
- Review a ranked report with reasons, exclusions, and assumptions.
- Top 5 shortlist
- Risk-adjusted ranking, not simply the cheapest row.
- Hidden-fee pressure
- Search, retrieval, OCR, and route complexity affect the score.
- Permalink report
- Share every scenario through a stable URL.
Useful for budget owners
- The output is built for product, engineering, and finance reviews. It ranks routes, shows cost layers, and explains why a cheaper headline price can still lose.
- Useful for AI leads
- The report exposes the monthly cost structure so technical buyers can see whether tokens, add-ons, or route complexity drive the shortlist.
How to use this tool well
- Model the real workload
- If your workflow uses search, retrieval, OCR, or managed state, enter those volumes. Raw token rows alone usually understate the real bill.
- Read the exclusions
- Rows are excluded when current public pricing is not comparable enough for a decision-grade estimate. That protects the shortlist from false precision.
- Share the permalink
- Every report can be shared as a stable URL so stakeholders review the same assumptions and shortlist.
Useful for content and research
Need broader market context? Read the full 2026 AI pricing comparison.
Analysis built on this data
Read the analysis behind the numbers
Articles that use this pricing data to answer specific cost questions.
- The real cost of generative AI tokens in 2026: the full provider-by-provider comparisonA practical comparison of token prices, caches, batch modes, file-processing costs, and portability across the biggest generative AI API providers.
- The Hidden Tradeoff in X API Pricing That Makes the Cheap Tier Look Better Than It IsThe low entry price in X API pricing can feel attractive until usage shape, credits, and practical feature limits start doing the real math.
- The AI Pricing Gap Between OpenAI and Its Cheapest Serious Rivals Is Wider Than Most Teams RealizeThe cheapest serious alternatives to OpenAI are not marginally cheaper. In several categories, they operate in a very different pricing range.
- The Cheapest AI Model for File-Heavy Workflows Is Not the Same as the Cheapest Chat ModelCheap chat rows and cheap file-heavy workflows diverge quickly once OCR, retrieval, or hosted file search enters the bill.
- The Cheapest Realtime AI Option in 2026 Is Not Priced the Way Most Teams ThinkRealtime comparisons break as soon as teams mix per-minute and per-token pricing without normalizing the workload.
- The Model That Beats OpenAI on Long-Context Economics Without the Pricing CliffAnthropic’s long-context pricing story is still one of the cleanest counterpoints to OpenAI’s repricing thresholds.
- The AI Provider Quietly Making OpenAI’s Premium Pricing Look StretchedQwen, Gemini, and Grok have all made the premium pricing conversation harder for OpenAI to own by default.
Frequently asked questions
Does the planner include hidden fees?
It includes comparable public add-on prices when the same source exposes them. When a reliable fee is unavailable, the ranking raises hidden-fee risk instead of inventing a number.
Are these prices guaranteed?
No. They are estimates based on the latest public pricing snapshot in the database. Confirm pricing, taxes, discounts, and contract terms with the provider before purchasing.
Can I share a scenario?
Yes. Generate a report and copy its permalink. Workload inputs and constraints are encoded in the URL so another person can review the same scenario.
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