> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

---
title: "Pricing & Cost Reference"
url: https://daily.dev/agentic-ai-hub/pricing-cost-reference/
description: "Pricing is a Frontier Model Comparison snapshot. This section is the durable part: how to reason about cost so you're not surprised by a bill."
lastUpdated: "2026-07-22"
---

> Pricing is a [Frontier Model Comparison](/agentic-ai-hub/frontier-model-comparison/) snapshot. This section is the *durable* part: how to reason about cost so you're not surprised by a bill. **As of July 2026.**

**How LLM pricing works.** You pay per token, and **input and output are priced separately** (output is typically 3 to 8× input, because it's generated sequentially). "Tokens" ≈ ¾ of a word in English. A back-of-envelope estimate: `cost ≈ (input_tokens × in_price + output_tokens × out_price) / 1,000,000`, multiplied by your request volume.

**The four levers that cut cost the most:**

1. **Prompt caching.** Reuse of a repeated prefix (system prompt, big context) at a large discount (often ~90% off input, sometimes ~99% for cache hits, e.g. DeepSeek). The single biggest win for agents and RAG that resend the same context. Structure prompts so the stable part comes first.  
2. **Batch APIs.** Non-urgent jobs (evals, bulk generation) at ~50% off, with a delayed SLA. Most providers offer it.  
3. **Right-sizing the model.** Use a mini/flash/haiku tier for routing, extraction, and classification. Reserve the flagship for genuinely hard steps. A [router](/agentic-ai-hub/apis-inference-platforms-gateways/) automates this.  
4. **Reasoning budget.** Hybrid models bill their hidden "thinking" tokens as output. Cap the reasoning effort where you don't need it. It's often the largest line item on agentic workloads.

**Watch-outs.** Long-context tiers often cost ~2× above a threshold (e.g. >200K tokens). Newer models may use a **different tokenizer**. Anthropic's newest generation reportedly emits ~30% more tokens for the same text, so compare *cost per task*, not just the headline per-token price. Vision/audio inputs are often billed as a large fixed token count per image/second.

**Ballpark tiers (per 1M output tokens, July 2026):** budget/open ≈ $0.30 to $3 (DeepSeek, Flash/Haiku/mini, self-host), mid ≈ $5 to $15 (Sonnet, Gemini Pro, GPT balanced), premium ≈ $25 to $90 (Opus, GPT Pro tiers). For live cost-per-task comparisons across providers, use [Artificial Analysis](https://artificialanalysis.ai/) and [OpenRouter](https://openrouter.ai/models).