LLM API Pricing, October 2026: Claude vs OpenAI vs Gemini

Last updated: October 8, 2026 - added Claude Haiku 5.5 (both 100K price tiers), Sonnet 5.5 and its cache-read cut, GPT-6.1 Sol, and Google's current Flash and Flash-Lite rows; re-checked every OpenAI, Gemini and DeepSeek rate against the providers' own pricing pages.

Among current-generation models, the lowest list price in October 2026 is shared by OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5, at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. Both read cached input at $0.01, though Haiku 5.5 only holds those rates for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. Older small models that are still on sale undercut them on sticker price: Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite lists $0.10 / $0.40 and OpenAI's GPT-5 nano lists $0.05 / $0.40. One tier up, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol all cost $2 / $10, Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4 / $20, and the max-capability tier (Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra) sits at $10 / $50. The rest of this page is the full rate card with a verification date on every row, plus the three caveats (tokenizer, long-context tiers, caching) that change the real bill.

Official Sources#

Every rate on this page was checked against the providers' own pricing pages on October 8, 2026, except where a row says otherwise:

What Changed (October 2026)#

Claude Haiku 5.5 launched October 7 at $0.10 / $0.50, tied with GPT-6 Luna as the cheapest current-generation model. Anthropic's new small model (claude-haiku-5-5) lists at $0.10 input, $0.50 output, $0.01 cache read and $0.125 five-minute cache write per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. Above 100,000 tokens every line rises 5x, to $0.50 / $2.50 / $0.05 / $0.625 (Haiku 5.5 overview, verified October 8, 2026). It keeps a 1M-token window and 128K max output. The catch is the tokenizer: per the migration guide, the same text produces approximately 30% more tokens on Haiku 5.5 than on Haiku 4.5, so the 100K line arrives sooner than old token counts suggest. Anthropic now labels Haiku 4.5 ($1 / $5) as legacy on claude.com/pricing. The worked cost examples and the migration checklist are in the Haiku 5.5 release guide.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved to $0.10 (October 7). Sonnet 5.5 shipped September 28 at $2 / $10, the same sticker as Sonnet 5 (Sonnet 5.5 overview, verified October 8, 2026). With the Haiku 5.5 launch, Anthropic cut its cache reads from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens, a 0.05x multiplier, and says the cut lowers Sonnet 5.5's cost on most agentic tasks by around 20% (Anthropic announcement). Sonnet 5.5 now reads cache at half Opus 5.5's rate and half GPT-6 Sol's $0.20, level with the $0.10 OpenAI lists for GPT-6.1 Sol. See the Sonnet 5.5 developer guide for the API changes; its cache-read examples predate the cut.

Max and Team plans now include a monthly API credit. The same announcement gives Max 5x subscribers $100 a month and Max 20x subscribers $200 a month in Claude Platform API credit, with Team plans pooled up to $500 (Help Center). It does not change any per-token rate and does not cover interactive Claude Code; what it covers is in our Max and Team API credits explainer.

What Changed (September 2026)#

The frontier workhorse tier repriced: GPT-6 Sol (September 22), Claude Opus 5.5 (September 22), and Grok 4.7 (September 21). Three flagship-tier launches inside 48 hours reset the table below. OpenAI's GPT-6 family (pricing verified October 8, 2026) ships Astra at $10/$50, Sol - now the coding-and-agentic flagship - at $2/$10, and Luna at $0.10/$0.50, all with a 1,050,000-token window; GPT-6 Sol at $2/$10 is the first frontier-class model priced below the mid tier, and GPT-6 Luna undercuts DeepSeek V4.1-Flash's off-peak input and output rates, though not its $0.003 cache hits (weekly roundup). Anthropic's Opus 5.5 arrives at $4/$20 with cache reads at $0.20 (a 0.05x multiplier versus the standard 0.1x) and fast mode at $8/$40; its sticker is 20 percent below Opus 5's $5/$25, and Anthropic says it performs at Fable 5.1 level on most work while costing 40 percent less than Opus 5 to run on typical workloads, with cache reads 60 percent cheaper. SpaceXAI's Grok 4.7 opened at $2/$6 with a fast variant at twice the output speed for twice the price (verified October 8, 2026). The GPT-5.6 family does not go away, but its role changes: GPT-5.6-Sol's $4/$20 promo runs at least through November 21, 2026, now undercut by its own successor.

Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 shipped September 1 at $10/$50 with cache hits cut to $0.25. The new generation keeps Fable 5's sticker rates but drops the cache-read multiplier from 0.1x to 0.025x (Anthropic pricing docs, verified October 8, 2026). For agent loops that re-read a stable system prompt every turn, that is a 75 percent reduction on the line item that dominates agentic input spend.

DeepSeek re-priced and renamed its budget tier (September 10). DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (552B MoE, asymmetric causal encoder-decoder with 8B active input / 16B output parameters) is the new deepseek-flash model; the old deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp names are retired but temporarily route to V4.1-Flash, and the release note says DeepSeek is phasing out V4-Pro, with deepseek-v4-pro requests routing to V4.1-Flash at V4.1-Flash rates from September 14 until V4.1-Pro launches; the pricing page still lists separate V4-Pro rates (release news, pricing, both verified October 8, 2026). Off-peak rates fell to $0.15 input / $0.003 cache hit / $0.60 output (peak 2x), from $0.22 / $0.007 / $0.66.

What Changed (August 2026)#

Claude Sonnet 5 pricing became permanent (August 15). Anthropic removed the promotional framing from Sonnet 5: the $2/$10 per MTok rates are now the standard price, and the previously scheduled September 1 increase to $3/$15 will not occur (Anthropic pricing, verified August 15, 2026). This makes Sonnet 5 structurally the cheapest Claude model above Haiku, not just temporarily. Every "promo ends September 1" note in this post from July is now outdated - treat $2/$10 as the going rate. Sonnet 5 remains the strongest price-performance Claude in the lineup, and the Fable 5 orchestrator playbook economics improve accordingly.

DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing gets a date and numbers (August 16, 16:00 UTC). DeepSeek's pricing page now lists the exact policy: off-peak rates at half of peak, peak hours 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC (09:00-12:00 and 14:00-18:00 Beijing Time), effective August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC. New rates: V4 Flash at $0.22 input (cache miss) / $0.007 (cache hit) / $0.66 output off-peak, doubling to $0.44 / $0.014 / $1.32 during peak; V4 Pro at $0.66 / $0.022 / $1.98 off-peak, doubling to $1.32 / $0.044 / $3.96 during peak (DeepSeek pricing, verified August 15, 2026). The old flat $0.14/$0.28 Flash pricing dies August 16. The V4 Pro model also updated to version DeepSeek-V4-Pro-0813. The headline: even off-peak, DeepSeek output rates roughly double; the cheap-agent math changes materially for output-heavy loops, and every off-peak-scheduling assumption needs the new numbers.

GPT-5.6 Sol price cut (August 27). OpenAI's pricing page now lists GPT-5.6-Sol at $4/$20 per MTok (cached input $0.40, cache writes $5.00), down from the $5/$30 listed here in previous sections. Long-context rates move to $8/$30, and Fast mode to $8/$40. Promotional pricing is in effect at least through November 21, 2026 (OpenAI pricing, verified August 27, 2026). Sol at $20 output now sits below Claude Opus 5's $25 output and ties GPT-5.5 on input - the first time a 5.6-tier model undercuts Opus on both axes.

What Changed (July 2026)#

GPT-5.6 price cuts landed (July 30). OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna 80% to $0.20/$1.20 per MTok and GPT-5.6 Terra 20% to $2/$12, and renamed Priority Processing to Fast mode (2x pricing, up to 2.5x speed) across the family (announcement, pricing page, both verified July 31, 2026). Luna now undercuts Claude Haiku 4.5 on input by 5x, and Terra ties Claude Sonnet 5's promotional input rate. The lower Luna and Terra rates also flow through to Codex and ChatGPT Work usage counting, so subscription quotas stretch further. Full breakdown in our price-cut analysis and budget tier comparison.

DeepSeek announced peak/off-peak pricing (July 31). DeepSeek's pricing page now warns that the API will adopt a peak/off-peak policy: 2x regular prices during peak hours (09:00-12:00 and 14:00-18:00 Beijing Time, UTC+8), effective date to be announced. The current $0.14/$0.28 V4 Flash rates below are pre-policy; budget models should assume off-peak prices are the floor and peak prices double. The V4 Flash model also updated to version DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 with 1M context, 384K max output, and Anthropic-format API support (DeepSeek pricing, verified July 31, 2026).

Claude Opus 5 launched (July 24) at $5/$25 per MTok. Anthropic's new flagship matches Opus 4.8 pricing while delivering near-Fable 5 intelligence on most benchmarks. It tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Leaderboard at 61, ahead of Fable 5 (60) and GPT-5.6 Sol (59). Available on the Claude API, Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Foundry. Fast mode (2x base pricing) supported on the Claude API only. Anthropic also lists Claude Mythos 5 (limited availability) at $10/$50, same rates as Fable 5. See the full Opus 5 vs Fable 5 comparison. This effectively resets the frontier tier: you now get Fable 5-competitive intelligence at Opus 4.8 prices.

DeepSeek deprecation deadline passed (July 24). The legacy deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner model names stopped serving requests on July 24. Any application still using these model identifiers receives errors. Migrate to deepseek-v4-flash ($0.14/$0.28 per MTok) or deepseek-v4-pro ($0.435/$0.87) if not already done. Our DeepSeek V4 migration guide covers the full transition.

GPT-5.6 family goes GA (July 9). OpenAI's new flagship line ships three tiers: Sol ($5/$30, matching GPT-5.5's rates), Terra ($2.50/$15 at launch, cut to $2/$12 on July 30), and Luna ($1/$6 at launch, cut to $0.20/$1.20 on July 30). All three inherit long-context pricing tiers that double rates above the standard window. Sol and GPT-5.5 now sit at parity on sticker price; routing decisions come down to benchmarks and cache behavior.

Claude Sonnet 5 pricing is now standard ($2/$10). Anthropic's August 15 pricing page lists Sonnet 5 at $2 input / $10 output with no end date and explicitly states the previously announced September 1 increase to $3/$15 will not occur. The promotional window is over in the sense that the price is now permanent. This undercuts every Opus tier and most competitors while staying well below GPT-5.6-Terra on output ($10 vs $12).

The tables below reflect Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and DeepSeek rates verified October 8, 2026.

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Sticker prices for model APIs have never been this spread out. At the top of the October 2026 table, GPT-5.5-pro charges $180 per million output tokens. At the bottom, Google's previous-generation Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite charges $0.40, a 450x gap. Among current-generation models the floor is GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 (under 100K tokens) at $0.50, a 360x gap, and the open-weights floor (DeepSeek V4.1-Flash) sits at $0.60 off-peak, a 300x spread.

This post is the raw API rate card: every current frontier and workhorse model from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek, with every number pulled from the live first-party pricing page and stamped with a verification date. If you are pricing coding tool subscriptions like Claude Code or Cursor plans instead, that is a different market with different math - see the companion post on AI coding tool pricing.

Four structural observations matter more than any single row: the September price war that repriced the frontier workhorse tier, OpenAI's GPT-6 family tiering now running from $0.10 Luna to $50 Astra, Anthropic's new Claude 5.5 lineup with falling cache multipliers and a prompt-length tier on Haiku 5.5, and the Claude tokenizer change that quietly skews per-MTok comparisons.

The Cross-Provider Price Table#

All prices in USD per million tokens (MTok), standard synchronous API, all rows verified October 8, 2026 against each provider's pricing page. Claude rows marked legacy are grouped under "Legacy models" on claude.com/pricing but still callable. DeepSeek rows show the current off-peak rates, with the peak rates in the sub-table below.

GPT-6 long-context rates (over 272K input tokens): Astra rises to $20/$75, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol to $4/$15, Luna to $0.20/$0.75. Opus 5.5 fast mode is $8/$40. Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 cache hits use a 0.05x multiplier; Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 use 0.025x; every other Claude model, Haiku 5.5 included, keeps the standard 0.1x (verified October 8, 2026).

DeepSeek peak/off-peak rates, in effect since August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, with the September 10 V4.1-Flash repricing (peak hours are 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC, Monday through Friday, excluding Chinese public holidays; every other hour, weekends included, is off-peak; peak = 2x off-peak; verified October 8, 2026):

Source pages (all verified October 8, 2026):

• Claude: platform.claude.com pricing
• OpenAI: developers.openai.com API pricing
• Gemini: ai.google.dev Gemini API pricing
• DeepSeek: api-docs.deepseek.com pricing

A few quick reads off the table. DeepSeek V4.1-Flash output off-peak at $0.60 is roughly 83x cheaper than Claude Fable 5.1 output at $50, and GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 (under 100K) at $0.50 are 100x cheaper; during DeepSeek's peak hours Flash's advantage drops to about 42x. Among current-generation models, the cost-optimized tier has two floors at the same price: GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 both list $0.10/$0.50 with $0.01 cache reads, undercutting DeepSeek V4.1-Flash ($0.15/$0.60 off-peak), Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30/$2.50) and the GPT-5.6 family. Only previous-generation models go lower: Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10/$0.40) and GPT-5 nano ($0.05/$0.40). The difference is the shape: Luna's rates rise only above 272K tokens (to $0.20/$0.75), while Haiku 5.5 jumps 5x to $0.50/$2.50 above 100K. One tier up, Claude Sonnet 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol all list $2/$10; Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol read cache at $0.10, GPT-6 Sol at $0.20. Claude Opus 5.5 ($4/$20) replaced Opus 5 ($5/$25) as Anthropic's Opus-class cost play, with cache reads at $0.20 - the same line item costs $0.25 on Fable 5.1 and $1.00 on Fable 5. Gemini caching is still the odd one out: it bills a per-token cache rate plus an hourly storage fee ($0.50 to $1.00 per MTok per hour on the Flash and Flash-Lite models, $4.50 on 3.1 Pro Preview), so a cache you hold but rarely hit can cost more than no cache.

Three Things the Table Does Not Tell You#

The Claude tokenizer makes per-MTok prices understate cost#

Anthropic's pricing page carries a note that is easy to skim past: Claude 4.7 and later models, which covers every 5.x model including Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5, use a newer tokenizer that produces approximately 30% more tokens for the same text, with the exact increase depending on content (Anthropic pricing docs, verified October 8, 2026). Haiku 5.5 is the first small model on it, so the Haiku 5.5 migration guide tells Haiku 4.5 users to recount prompts rather than reuse old counts.

This matters for cross-provider comparisons. Fable 5.1 versus Opus 5.5 is apples to apples, since both use the new tokenizer; Haiku 5.5 versus Haiku 4.5 is not. But if you compare either against Sonnet 4.5-era baselines, or against another provider using your old token counts, the same prompt now consumes roughly 30% more billable tokens, with the exact increase varying by content. The honest comparison requires re-counting your actual prompts with Anthropic's token counting endpoint, not multiplying old counts by new rates. For workload-level math, see Fable 5 production cost modeling.

Long-context premiums: Claude is flat except Haiku 5.5, Gemini and OpenAI tier#

Anthropic's pricing page says Claude 4.6 and later models, except Claude Haiku 5.5, include the full 1M token context window at standard pricing: a 900K-token request bills at the same per-token rate as a 9K-token request, and caching and batch discounts apply at standard rates across the full window. That covers Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Sonnet 5, and the 4.6-and-later Opus and Sonnet models (verified October 8, 2026).

Haiku 5.5 is the exception, and it is the steepest tier on the table. It is priced by prompt length: up to 100,000 tokens it bills $0.10 / $0.50, and over 100,000 tokens it bills $0.50 / $2.50, with cache reads and writes moving 5x as well (Anthropic pricing docs, verified October 8, 2026). The line is measured in new-tokenizer tokens, so a prompt that counted 80K on Haiku 4.5 can land past 100K on Haiku 5.5. If you replay long conversations into a small model, trimming context under the line matters more than the sticker price; the Haiku 5.5 guide works through both sides of the cliff.

Gemini still tiers. Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview doubles input from $2 to $4 and lifts output from $12 to $18 once a prompt crosses 200K tokens, and the cache rate doubles too (Gemini API pricing, verified October 8, 2026). Gemini 2.5 Pro tiers the same way at the same boundary. So the headline "Gemini Pro is cheaper than Sonnet" claim flips for genuinely long-context work: above 200K tokens, Gemini 3.1 Pro input ($4) exceeds Sonnet 4.6 input ($3), which does not tier at all. OpenAI tiers as well, framed as separate long-context rates: GPT-6 Astra rises from $10 / $50 to $20 / $75, GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol from $2 / $10 to $4 / $15, GPT-6 Luna from $0.10 / $0.50 to $0.20 / $0.75, GPT-5.6-Sol from $4 / $20 to $8 / $30, Terra from $2 / $12 to $4 / $18, Luna from $0.20 / $1.20 to $0.40 / $1.80, and GPT-5.5-pro from $30 / $180 to $60 / $270 above 272K input tokens (OpenAI pricing, verified October 8, 2026). Of the four providers, only DeepSeek charges one flat rate on every model across the full window; Anthropic is flat on everything except Haiku 5.5.

Caching mechanics differ more than the discounts do#

All four providers discount aggressively, but the shapes are different:

• Anthropic: cache reads at 0.1x base input on most models (Haiku 5.5's $0.01 is 0.1x of $0.10) - except 0.05x on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 and 0.025x on Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 - cache writes at 1.25x (5-minute TTL) or 2x (1-hour TTL). Batch API is a flat 50% off input and output (pricing docs, verified October 8, 2026).
• OpenAI: cached input at 0.1x on most models ($0.50 on GPT-5.5's $5 input) and 0.05x on GPT-6.1 Sol ($0.10), cache writes at 1.25x base input for the GPT-5.6 and GPT-6 families ($0.125 on GPT-6 Luna, $2.50 on GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol and Terra, $5.00 on GPT-5.6-Sol, $12.50 on Astra), no cached rate listed for the pro models, batch at 50% off. Fast mode is 2x standard pricing ($4/$20 on GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol, $8/$40 on GPT-5.6-Sol, $4/$24 on Terra, $0.40/$2.40 on GPT-5.6-Luna) (OpenAI pricing, verified October 8, 2026).
• Google: per-token cache rate plus an hourly storage fee, batch at 50% off (Gemini pricing, verified October 8, 2026).
• DeepSeek: the most aggressive cache discount on the table. V4.1-Flash off-peak cache hits bill at $0.003 versus $0.15 for misses, a 0.02x multiplier. The peak/off-peak policy (2x rates during 01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC on weekdays) has been in effect since August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC, and the September 10 repricing cut off-peak cache hits from $0.007 to $0.003 (DeepSeek pricing, verified October 8, 2026).

If your workload is a chat or agent loop that resends a large stable prefix every turn, effective cost is dominated by the cache read rate, not the headline input rate. That reshuffles the table substantially in DeepSeek's and Anthropic's favor.

Head-to-Head by Tier#

Matching models by intended tier rather than by name, all rows verified October 8, 2026:

October's launches filled in Anthropic's side of the two lower rows: Sonnet 5.5 replaces Sonnet 5 at the same $2/$10 with half the cache-read rate, and Haiku 5.5 ties GPT-6 Luna at the current-generation cost floor as long as prompts stay under 100K tokens. September's launches had already shuffled the top two rows. Max capability: Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 (September 1) hold the $10/$50 slot with cache hits at $0.25, and GPT-6 Astra matches them on sticker price. Frontier workhorse: GPT-6 Sol at $2/$10 (and now GPT-6.1 Sol at the same rates with $0.10 cache reads) costs half of Opus 5.5 on both input and output while matching Sonnet's sticker, and Opus 5.5 at $4/$20 landed 20 percent below Opus 5's $5/$25 sticker, with Anthropic putting the saving on typical workloads at 40 percent and its cache reads at 60 percent below Opus 5; Grok 4.7 at $2/$6 (September 21, announcement, verified October 8) sits in the same tier at the lowest output rate of any flagship. Fast and cheap: GPT-6 Luna at $0.10/$0.50 undercut DeepSeek's input and output rates in September, and Haiku 5.5 matched it in October; DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash ($0.15/$0.60 off-peak) is still the open-weights floor. Grok is not in the table above because SpaceXAI does not publish a full public rate card in the format the other four do; the $2/$6 API rate is from the official announcement. There is a deeper dive in the Fable 5 cost-per-task analysis, the budget tier comparison, and the September price war roundup.

Decision Guide by Persona#

Side projects and prototypes. GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 (under 100K-token prompts) at $0.10 / $0.50 are the cheapest current-generation models in this table, with DeepSeek V4.1-Flash ($0.15 / $0.60 off-peak) close behind. If an older small model is good enough, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10 / $0.40, with a free tier) and GPT-5 nano ($0.05 / $0.40) cost less. At these prices, model choice is a quality decision, not a budget one. The open-weights angle adds another dimension - see notes on DeepSeek's open-weights economics.

Production apps with steady traffic. The mid-tier triangle is now Claude Sonnet 5.5 ($2 / $10), GPT-5.6-Terra ($2 / $12), and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview ($2 / $12 under 200K). All three match on input; Sonnet 5.5 wins on output and, since October 7, on cache reads at $0.10. If your prompts regularly exceed 200K tokens, Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview rises to $4 / $18 while Sonnet 5.5 stays at $2 / $10 (Terra also rises to $4 / $18, but only above 272K).

Agentic and long-horizon workloads. Output tokens dominate agent spend, and output is where the providers diverge most. After the September launches, GPT-6 Sol at $2 / $10 is the first flagship-class model that does not punish output-heavy agent loops - its $10 output undercuts Claude Opus 5.5 ($20), Opus 5 ($25), and Fable 5.1 ($50), and Grok 4.7 at $6 output is the only sub-$10 flagship rate. At the cheap end, GPT-6 Luna and Haiku 5.5 tie at $0.50 output; Haiku 5.5 is the better deal only while each request stays under 100K tokens, and Luna is the safer default for long-context subagents - see the budget tier comparison for the per-task math. Fable 5.1 at $50 output only pays off when its quality reduces retries and total tokens. Batch APIs (50% off at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google) are the easiest structural saving for any agent pipeline that is not latency-sensitive.

Teams routing across providers. With four providers publishing OpenAI-compatible or near-compatible APIs and a 450x output price spread, routing cheap-by-default with escalation on failure is increasingly the rational architecture. The LLM router comparison covers the tooling, and the routing strategies guide has the decision frameworks.

Compliance-constrained teams. Residency costs extra everywhere: Anthropic applies a 1.1x multiplier for US-only inference on Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and later models, and OpenAI charges a 10% uplift for regional data-residency processing on models released on or after March 5, 2026 (both verified October 8, 2026 on the pricing pages above).

When to Skip the Switch#

Cheaper sticker prices do not automatically mean cheaper bills, and there are real reasons to stay put:

• Your cache is tuned. Prompt caches are provider-scoped and model-scoped. Switching providers means cold caches, re-tuned breakpoints, and a transition period at full input rates that can eat months of theoretical savings.
• Your spend is output-dominated and quality-sensitive. A cheaper model that needs two attempts costs more than an expensive one that needs one. Measure completion rates per task, not dollars per token.
• You depend on provider-specific features. Anthropic's 1-hour cache TTL, Gemini's explicit cache storage model, and DeepSeek's dual OpenAI- and Anthropic-format endpoints are not interchangeable. Migration cost is real engineering time.
• DeepSeek's peak/off-peak policy and model rename are now in effect. The 2x peak-hour multiplier (01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC on weekdays) landed August 16, 2026 at 16:00 UTC; September's V4.1-Flash repricing cut off-peak rates to $0.15 / $0.60 and renamed the model to deepseek-flash, and DeepSeek's release note says deepseek-v4-pro requests route to V4.1-Flash at V4.1-Flash rates from September 14 until V4.1-Pro launches. Any DeepSeek cost model built on the old $0.28 or even $0.66 output numbers needs re-basing (DeepSeek pricing, verified October 8, 2026).

If none of those apply and your evals show parity, the spread in this table is too large to ignore.

FAQ#

What is the cheapest LLM API in October 2026?#

Among current-generation models, it is a tie between OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5: both list at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, with cache reads at $0.01. Haiku 5.5 holds that price only for prompts up to 100,000 tokens and rises to $0.50 / $2.50 above it, while Luna's long-context rates start above 272K input tokens. Previous-generation small models still on sale are cheaper on sticker price: Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite at $0.10 / $0.40 and OpenAI's GPT-5 nano at $0.05 / $0.40 (all verified October 8, 2026). DeepSeek V4.1-Flash (deepseek-flash) at $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak (cache hit $0.003) is the open-weights floor; DeepSeek peak hours (01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC on weekdays) double it to $0.30 / $1.20.

What changed in Claude API pricing in October 2026?#

Three things, all announced October 7, 2026. Claude Haiku 5.5 launched at $0.10 / $0.50 under 100K tokens and $0.50 / $2.50 above. Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache reads fell from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens, with input and output unchanged at $2 / $10. And Max and Team subscribers now get a monthly API credit ($100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x, up to $500 pooled on Team) that does not change any per-token rate. Opus 5.5 ($4 / $20) and Fable 5.1 ($10 / $50) did not move.

Does Claude charge extra for long context in 2026?#

Only on Haiku 5.5. Anthropic's pricing page says Claude 4.6 and later models, except Haiku 5.5, include the full 1M token context window at standard per-token rates, so Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Sonnet 5, and the 4.6-and-later Opus and Sonnet models bill a 900K-token request at the same rate as a 9K one. Haiku 5.5 is priced by prompt length: prompts over 100,000 tokens pay 5x ($0.50 / $2.50 instead of $0.10 / $0.50), counted in its newer tokenizer (verified October 8, 2026). Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and Gemini 2.5 Pro still charge higher rates for prompts above 200K tokens. OpenAI's GPT-6 and GPT-5.6 families also tier above 272K input tokens: GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6.1 Sol rise from $2/$10 to $4/$15, GPT-6 Luna from $0.10/$0.50 to $0.20/$0.75, GPT-5.6-Sol from $4/$20 to $8/$30, Terra from $2/$12 to $4/$18, and Luna from $0.20/$1.20 to $0.40/$1.80.

How much more expensive is Claude Fable 5.1 than GPT-6 Sol?#

Fable 5.1 costs $10 input / $50 output per MTok versus GPT-6 Sol (and GPT-6.1 Sol) at $2 / $10, so 5x on input and 5x on output. Against GPT-6 Astra ($10 / $50) it is a tie on sticker price with a 4x cheaper cache-read line ($0.25 versus $1.00). Against GPT-5.5-pro ($30 / $180), Fable 5.1 is the cheaper max-capability option by 3x on input and 3.6x on output. All figures verified October 8, 2026.

What is GPT-6 and how does it compare to GPT-5.6?#

GPT-6 is OpenAI's newest flagship family, released September 22, 2026 in three tiers: Astra ($10/$50, the max-capability model), Sol ($2/$10, the coding-and-agentic flagship), and Luna ($0.10/$0.50, the high-volume workhorse), all with a 1,050,000-token context window. GPT-6 Sol undercuts GPT-5.6-Sol ($4/$20) on both axes, and OpenAI's pricing page now also lists GPT-6.1 Sol at the same $2/$10 with cached input halved to $0.10. Luna at $0.10/$0.50 is the cheapest GPT-6 model, though OpenAI still sells older small models for less, such as GPT-5 nano at $0.05/$0.40 (verified October 8, 2026). GPT-5.6 stays on the table: Sol's $4/$20 promo runs at least through November 21, 2026, and Terra ($2/$12) and Luna ($0.20/$1.20) keep serving mid-tier traffic.

Why do per-MTok prices understate Claude costs?#

Claude 4.7 and later models, including Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, and Haiku 5.5, use a newer tokenizer that produces approximately 30% more tokens for the same text than older Claude models, per Anthropic's pricing documentation (verified October 8, 2026). Token counts measured on older models such as Haiku 4.5 or Sonnet 4.6 do not transfer, so per-MTok comparisons against those baselines undercount real spend, and on Haiku 5.5 they can also hide a crossing of the 100K price line.

Do all providers offer batch discounts?#

Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all offer a 50% batch discount on input and output tokens (all verified October 8, 2026). On Haiku 5.5 the batch rates keep the 100K split: $0.05 / $0.25 under it, $0.25 / $1.25 over. DeepSeek's pricing page lists no batch tier, but its standard rates sit below the other providers' batch rates in most tiers anyway.

When does Claude Sonnet 5 promotional pricing end?#

It does not - the promotion became the standard price. Anthropic's August 15 pricing update made the $2/$10 per MTok rates for Sonnet 5 standard and cancelled the increase to $3/$15 scheduled for September 1, 2026, and the Claude API pricing docs still list Sonnet 5 at $2/$10 with no end date (verified October 8, 2026). claude.com/pricing now groups Sonnet 5 under "Legacy models", and its successor Sonnet 5.5 costs the same $2/$10 with cheaper cache reads ($0.10 versus $0.20), so there is no price reason to stay on Sonnet 5.

Continue Reading#

• Claude Haiku 5.5: Pricing, Migration Changes, and When to Use It - the 100K price cliff worked through, plus the ten migration steps from Haiku 4.5
• Claude Sonnet 5.5 Developer Guide - the $2/$10 mid-tier model, its benchmarks, and the five breaking API changes
• GPT-6 Sol vs Claude Opus 5.5 vs Grok 4.7: The September 2026 Price War - the week's three frontier launches, head to head
• Claude Opus 5.5 Release Guide: Fable 5.1-Level Coding at $4/$20 - benchmarks and the OpenCode setup
• Budget AI Coding Models Compared 2026 - per-task math for the cheap tier
• AI Model Routing Strategies for Cost-Effective Coding - how to put these rates to work
• DeepSeek V4 Migration Guide - step-by-step migration from legacy model names, including the September rename

Sources#

• Claude API pricing docs - every Claude row, cache multipliers, long-context and Haiku 5.5 prompt-length pricing, batch rates, tokenizer note (verified October 8, 2026)
• claude.com/pricing - Claude rates and the "Legacy models" grouping (verified October 8, 2026)
• Claude Haiku 5.5 model overview - release date, 1M context, 128K output, both price tiers (verified October 8, 2026)
• Claude Haiku 5.5 migration guide - approximately 30% more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text (verified October 8, 2026)
• Claude Sonnet 5.5 model overview - September 28 release, $2/$10, $0.10 cache read (verified October 8, 2026)
• Anthropic, "Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5" - Haiku 5.5 pricing, Sonnet 5.5 cache-read cut, Max and Team API credits (October 7, 2026)
• Claude Help Center: Monthly API credits for Max and Team plans - credit amounts and what they cover (verified October 8, 2026)
• Anthropic, Claude Opus 5.5 announcement - Opus 5.5 launch pricing and the 40 percent typical-workload saving versus Opus 5 (verified October 8, 2026)
• OpenAI API pricing - GPT-6, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-5.6, GPT-5.5 and GPT-5 nano rows, long-context and fast-mode rates (verified October 8, 2026)
• Gemini API pricing - Gemini rows, Flash-Lite tiers and cache storage fees (verified October 8, 2026)
• DeepSeek API pricing and V4.1 release news - V4.1-Flash and peak/off-peak rates (verified October 8, 2026)
• SpaceXAI, Grok 4.7 announcement - Grok 4.7 API rate (verified October 8, 2026)