API prices fell ~80% in a year — see what re-shopping models saves.
With prices down ~80% year over year, re-shopping models quarterly is one of the highest-ROI things an AI product can do. Plan the switch cost on the model migration cost calculator and find the floor on the cheapest LLM API guide.
The LLM Price Drop Savings Calculator computes how much money you save each month by switching from an older, more expensive model to a cheaper one at the same usage level. It takes three inputs — your old price per 1M tokens, the new price per 1M tokens, and your monthly token volume in millions — and multiplies the per-token price difference by that volume. The main drivers are the size of the price gap between the two rates and how many tokens you actually process, so a large drop at high volume produces the biggest monthly savings, while a small drop at low volume barely moves the total.
The practical tip is to base the tokens per month figure on real billing data rather than a guess, since a wrong volume scales the entire result. Also watch the key trade-off: a lower headline price is only a true saving if the cheaper model still meets your quality and latency needs. If switching forces longer prompts, more retries, or added review work, your effective token count rises and can quietly erode the savings this calculator shows.
Roughly 80% between early 2025 and early 2026. Frontier-quality output that cost $10–15 per million tokens is now available for a few dollars, and budget models have fallen below $0.20 per million input tokens. Staying on a year-old model often means paying several times the current rate for the same quality.
Quarterly at least. New models and price cuts land constantly, so re-benchmark your actual prompts against current options every few months. Often a newer or smaller model matches your quality bar at a fraction of the cost — the switch is a pure margin win.