Example AI API workloads and monthly bills

Four realistic monthly token volumes — the same ones behind our cheapest-by-job picks — with today’s lowest qualifying list price for each. Use them as a starting point, then plug your own numbers into the savings calculator.

Checked Oct 15, 2026. Standard pay-as-you-go text prices only (no batch or cached-input discounts). “Tier” is our rough capability judgment, not a benchmark.

Simple Q&A / chat

Example volume: 10M in / 2M out tokens a month. Needs tier ≥1. 30 of 30 models qualify.

1. GPT-OSS 20B (Groq) — $1.35/mo (cheapest)
2. GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI) — $2.00/mo (+$0.65)
3. Claude Haiku 5.5 (Anthropic) — $2.00/mo (+$0.65)

Caveat: Small models are fine for FAQs and short answers but hallucinate more on niche facts.

Full cheapest-for-simple q&a / chat ranking → · Compare against Claude Opus 5.5 at this volume →

Coding

Example volume: 20M in / 5M out tokens a month. Needs tier ≥2. 22 of 30 models qualify.

1. GLM-5.3 Flash (Together) — $5.50/mo (cheapest)
2. GPT-OSS 120B (Groq) — $6.00/mo (+$0.50)
3. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — $12.00/mo (+$6.50)

Caveat: Coding quality varies a lot by language and repo size; run your own tests before switching.

Full cheapest-for-coding ranking → · Compare against Claude Opus 5.5 at this volume →

Long documents

Example volume: 100M in / 2M out tokens a month. Needs tier ≥2 and context ≥500,000. 5 of 30 models qualify.

1. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash — $32.40/mo (cheapest)
2. Mistral Large 4 — $72.18/mo (+$39.78)
3. Grok 4.3 (xAI) — $130.00/mo (+$97.60)

Caveat: Only models with a published context ≥500K are considered; several providers bill more above 200K–272K prompt tokens.

Full cheapest-for-long documents ranking → · Compare against Claude Opus 5.5 at this volume →

Hard reasoning

Example volume: 10M in / 10M out tokens a month. Needs tier ≥3. 14 of 30 models qualify.

1. Mistral Large 4 — $27.70/mo (cheapest)
2. DeepSeek V4 Pro — $52.80/mo (+$25.10)
3. Grok 4.7 (xAI) — $80.00/mo (+$52.30)

Caveat: Reasoning models spend extra 'thinking' tokens billed as output, so real cost can be several times this estimate.

Full cheapest-for-hard reasoning ranking → · Compare against Claude Opus 5.5 at this volume →

How do I estimate my own monthly AI API bill?

Use the savings calculator on the home page: pick a model, enter your monthly input and output millions of tokens, and see cheaper alternatives at the same tier or higher. Start from the baseline Claude Opus 5.5 or any model on our table.

New to the numbers? Read how AI pricing works or the glossary. Ready to spend less? See how to cut your AI bill and current sale prices. Or browse models, providers and compares.

Example volumes match our job pages. Real bills depend on your tokenizer, prompt length and any thinking tokens billed as output. Always check the provider’s pricing page before you buy.