Price
Input against output token prices
The input price is what you pay per million tokens you send, and the output price is what you pay per million tokens the model writes, and the second is the higher.
LLM token prices
Answer in brief
10 short entries on the questions people ask around LLM token prices.
Each opens with its answer, then gives the detail and the terms behind it.
Price
The input price is what you pay per million tokens you send, and the output price is what you pay per million tokens the model writes, and the second is the higher.
Hosts
The maker rate is what the lab that trained a model charges on its own API, and a host rate is what another company charges to serve the same open weights.
Caching
A cached input price is a lower rate for input tokens the host has already processed, and it can cut the bill of any application that resends a long opening.
Practical
Read a token price page in five passes: the unit, the two prices, the exact model, the limits, and the date.
Tokens
A token is a piece of text, usually shorter than a word, and your bill counts every one the model reads and writes, including many you never see.
Price
A blended price folds the input and output prices into one figure at an assumed mix, which is handy for a first sort and wrong for a budget.
Estimating
A monthly token bill is your input tokens times the input price plus your output tokens times the output price, counted from real requests and not from guesses.
Buying
Paying per token costs nothing when you send nothing, while a rented GPU costs the same whether it serves one request or a million, so the choice turns on how steady your traffic is.
Models
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is among the most widely hosted open models, so its token price is a range and not a figure.
Models
Kimi K3 is an open model whose output tokens are priced several times above its input tokens, so what it costs you depends on how much it writes.
Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.
API Token Prices. “Topics.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://apitokenprices.com/topics