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Research Report 03 • September 2026
AI API Token Economics & Pricing
An empirical audit of input and output token expenses across 5 major model families. Discover the intelligence-to-cost frontier and cost-optimization routing strategies.
Lowest Cost Model
$0.075 / 1M
Gemini 1.5 Flash input
Reasoning Cost Leader
$0.55 / 1M
DeepSeek R1 input
Gateway Markup
$0.00
100% direct provider parity
Token Cost Comparison Matrix (Per 1 Million Tokens)
| Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Relative Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 1.5 Flash | $0.075 | $0.30 | 33x cheaper than GPT-4o |
| Llama 3.3 70B | $0.400 | $0.40 | 25x cheaper than Claude 3.5 |
| DeepSeek R1 | $0.550 | $2.19 | 7x cheaper than Claude 3.5 |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.250 | $5.00 | 2x cheaper than GPT-4o |
| GPT-4o | $2.500 | $10.00 | Industry Benchmark |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | $3.000 | $15.00 | Premium Code |