Full price table — your workload
Reference $/1M tokens (June 2026), monthly cost on your numbers above.
| Provider | Model | In $/1M | Out $/1M | Cost / mo |
|---|
Cheapest by use case
- High-volume / simple (classification, extraction, routing): Gemini 2.0 Flash or GPT-4o mini — pennies per thousand requests.
- Chatbots & support: GPT-4o mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash — cheap, fast, good enough; see the chatbot cost calculator.
- RAG / long context: Gemini 2.5 Flash or Pro (low input price helps when you stuff in retrieved chunks); see the RAG cost calculator.
- Hard reasoning / coding: Claude Sonnet 4 or GPT-4o; Claude Opus / o3 only when you truly need it.
- Need a free tier: Gemini (AI Studio) is the only one of the three with a genuine free quota.
How to actually choose
Brand loyalty is the most expensive habit in AI. The three providers leapfrog each other constantly, and the real cost difference comes from two things you control: the model tier you pick and how long your outputs are. A frontier model on short answers can be cheaper than a "cheap" model on rambling ones. Price the workload, not the logo — the table above does exactly that on your own numbers.
Drill into one provider with the GPT-4o calculator, the Claude calculator or the Gemini calculator, compare all models at once on the full AI API cost calculator, or estimate a whole product with the AI app cost estimator.
FAQ
Which is cheapest overall? For capable-but-cheap, Gemini 2.0 Flash and GPT-4o mini. For flagships it's closer and workload-dependent.
Does the cheapest model mean lowest total cost? Not always — a slightly pricier model that answers in fewer tokens can win. Compare on your real token counts.