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GlossaryTerm

AI Cost (Per-Token Pricing)

You pay per million input and output tokens. Output is 3-5× more expensive than input.

Frontier models bill per million tokens. As of late 2025, GPT-4o is $2.50/$10 (input/output), Claude Sonnet is $3/$15, Gemini 2.5 Pro is $1.25/$10. Cheaper tiers (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku, Gemini Flash) cost a fraction.

The two unit-economics levers most teams ignore: caching (provider re-uses identical prefix tokens at 10-25% the price) and routing (use a cheap model for easy cases and the expensive one only when needed). Together these typically cut bills 60-80% with no quality loss.

Use our AI cost calculator to model it before you commit.

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