Home › Blog › AI API Pricing Comparison 2026
📅 Published July 8, 2026 · AIWave Team

AI API Pricing Comparison 2026: Every Major Provider, All Numbers

# AI API Pricing Comparison 2026: Every Major Provider, All Numbers

Pricing for AI APIs is a mess. Every provider uses different tiers, different billing models, and different names for similar capabilities. This article puts every major model's pricing side by side so you can stop guessing and start optimizing.

Full Price Table (USD per 1M Tokens)

Sorted by total cost for a typical 1:1 input/output ratio. All prices are current as of July 2026 from AIWave's live pricing data.

Ultra-Cheap ($0.005–$0.04/1M)

Model Input Output Context Vendor
GLM 5 $0.03 $0.03 128K Zhipu AI
ERNIE 3.5/4.0 Turbo/Speed/Lite/Char (8 models) $0.03 $0.03 8K Baidu
ERNIE 4.0 8K $0.005 $0.005 8K Baidu
ERNIE 4.0 Turbo 128K $0.018 $0.018 128K Baidu
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B/32B $0.015 $0.031 128K DeepSeek
GLM 5 $0.031 $0.031 8K Zhipu AI

Budget Tier ($0.01-0.05/1M)

Model Input Output Context Vendor
Qwen3 8B $0.05 $0.40 128K Alibaba
GLM 5X $0.06 $0.06 128K Zhipu AI
ERNIE Speed Pro 128K $0.063 $0.126 128K Baidu
Qwen3 Coder 480B $0.12 $0.36 128K Alibaba
DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.14 $0.28 1M DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3 / V3.2 $0.15 $0.308 64K DeepSeek
GLM 5 $0.15 $0.15 128K Zhipu AI
DeepSeek Chat $0.164 $0.329 128K DeepSeek
Qwen3 32B $0.20 $0.60 128K Alibaba

Mid-Range ($0.05-0.15/1M)

Model Input Output Context Vendor
DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.42 $0.84 1M DeepSeek
GLM 5 $0.452 $0.452 128K Zhipu AI
MiniMax M2.5 $0.50 $2.00 1M MiniMax
GLM 5 $0.60 $2.19 128K Zhipu AI
DeepSeek R1 $0.605 $2.42 64K DeepSeek

Higher-End ($0.15-0.90/1M)

Model Input Output Context Vendor
GLM 5 $1.00 $3.19 128K Zhipu AI
GLM 5 $1.20 $4.00 128K Zhipu AI
GLM 5 $1.40 $4.40 128K Zhipu AI
Kimi K2.7 Code $1.09 $4.60 128K Moonshot
Qwen3 235B $1.50 $6.00 128K Alibaba
ERNIE 5.0 / 5.1 $2.055 $2.055 8K Baidu
Kimi K2.7 Code HighSpeed $2.19 $9.20 128K Moonshot

Western Providers (for comparison)

Model Input (est.) Output (est.) Context Vendor
Claude 3.5 Haiku $0.80 $4.00 200K Anthropic
Claude 3.5 Sonnet $3.00 $15.00 200K Anthropic
GPT-4o $2.50 $10.00 128K OpenAI
GPT-4o Mini $0.15 $0.60 128K OpenAI
Gemini 1.5 Flash $0.075 $0.30 1M Google
Gemini 1.5 Pro $1.25 $5.00 2M Google

Cost Calculation Formula

To estimate your monthly spend:


Monthly Cost = (Monthly Input Tokens / 1,000,000) 脳 Input Price
             + (Monthly Output Tokens / 1,000,000) 脳 Output Price

Practical example: Processing 10M input tokens and 20M output tokens per month:

Model Monthly Cost
GLM 5 $0.90
DeepSeek V4 Flash $7.00
DeepSeek V4 Pro $21.00
GPT-4o $225.00
Claude 3.5 Sonnet $330.00

That's not a typo. DeepSeek V4 Pro delivers comparable (or better) benchmark scores to GPT-4o at 10.7x lower cost.

The Chinese Model Advantage

Chinese AI providers consistently undercut Western pricing by 5-50x while maintaining competitive quality:

This isn't about compromising quality. DeepSeek V4 Pro scores 92.1 on HumanEval (vs GPT-4o's 90.2) and 90.2 on MATH (vs 76.6). You're paying less for equal or better performance.

Smart Model Selection Strategy

  1. Always start cheap. Use glm-5 or ERNIE affordable models for prototyping. Minimal cost, immediate feedback.
  2. Match model to task complexity. Don't use a $0.42/1M model for simple text classification. Use ernie-4.0-turbo-128k at $0.018/1M instead.
  3. Use output pricing to guide model choice. If your workload is output-heavy (code generation, long responses), models with low output ratios like GLM 5 ($0.15/$0.15) save significantly.
  4. Budget for context size. DeepSeek V4 Flash and V4 Pro offer 1M context windows 鈥?a feature that costs $1.25/1M input on Gemini 1.5 Pro.

Token Cost Quick Reference

For a 1K token prompt producing 500 tokens of output:

Model Cost per Call
GLM 5 $0.000045
DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.00000028
DeepSeek V4 Pro $0.00000084
GPT-4o $0.007500

At 10,000 calls/day, that's $0.45 vs $0.38 vs $1.16 vs $75.00. Scale makes the difference obvious.

Get Your Free API Key →

$5 free credit to test 60+ AI models