The Price War

The LLM API market in 2026 is experiencing a genuine price war. Over the past year, inference costs have dropped 2-5x depending on the provider. Let’s look at how much the main models cost today and how to choose the best option.

Price Table (March 2026)

Flagship Models

Model Input ($/1M) Output ($/1M) Cached Input Context
GPT-5.3 $8.00 $24.00 $2.00 128K
Claude Opus 4.6 $15.00 $75.00 $3.75 200K
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3.00 $15.00 $0.75 256K
Gemini 3.1 Pro $3.50 $10.50 $0.88 1M
DeepSeek V3 $0.27 $1.10 $0.07 128K
Qwen 3 72B $0.40 $1.20 – 128K

Lightweight Models

Model Input ($/1M) Output ($/1M) Context
GPT-5.3 Mini $0.40 $1.60 128K
Claude Haiku 3.5 $0.80 $4.00 200K
Gemini 3.1 Flash $0.15 $0.60 1M
DeepSeek V3 Lite $0.07 $0.28 64K
Qwen 3 7B $0.05 $0.15 32K

Reasoning Models

Model Input ($/1M) Output ($/1M)
o3 $10.00 $40.00
o4-mini $1.10 $4.40
DeepSeek R1 $0.55 $2.19
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (extended) $3.00 $15.00

What It Costs in Practice

Scenario 1: Analyzing a Single Financial Report

  • Document size: ~30,000 tokens (input)
  • Model response: ~2,000 tokens (output)
Model Cost per Request
GPT-5.3 $0.29
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $0.12
Gemini 3.1 Pro $0.13
DeepSeek V3 $0.01

Scenario 2: Daily News Analysis (100 articles)

  • Input: ~500,000 tokens/day
  • Output: ~50,000 tokens/day
Model Cost/Day Cost/Month
GPT-5.3 $5.20 $156
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $2.25 $67.50
Gemini 3.1 Pro $2.28 $68.25
DeepSeek V3 $0.19 $5.64

Scenario 3: Agentic Trading System (24/7)

  • Requests per day: ~1,000
  • Average input: 10,000 tokens
  • Average output: 1,000 tokens
  • Monthly: 300M input + 30M output
Model Cost/Month
GPT-5.3 $3,120
Claude Opus 4.6 $6,750
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $1,350
Gemini 3.1 Pro $1,365
DeepSeek V3 $114

Hidden Costs

Price per token is not the only factor:

Rate Limits

  • OpenAI: 500-10,000 RPM (depends on tier)
  • Anthropic: 1,000-4,000 RPM
  • Google: up to 60,000 RPM
  • DeepSeek: throttling under heavy load

Latency

  • GPT-5.3: ~800ms TTFT
  • Claude Sonnet 4.6: ~600ms TTFT
  • Gemini 3.1 Pro: ~500ms TTFT
  • DeepSeek V3: ~1200ms TTFT (due to server geography)

Reliability (Uptime)

  • OpenAI: 99.8% (occasional incidents)
  • Anthropic: 99.9%
  • Google: 99.95%
  • DeepSeek: 99.5% (young infrastructure)

Recommendations

Use Case Best Choice Reason
Bulk data analysis DeepSeek V3 Price
Mission-critical decisions Claude Opus 4.6 Quality
Coding Claude Sonnet 4.6 SWE-Bench
Long context Gemini 3.1 Pro 1M tokens
Budget option Qwen 3 7B (self-hosted) Free

Prices continue to fall. What costs $100/month today could cost $20 a year from now. Plan your infrastructure with this trend in mind.