AI Model Pricing Comparison Table (2026)

Complete, up-to-date pricing for every major LLM API. Sort by price, provider, or capability. Last updated: April 2026.

On mobile, scroll horizontally to compare every column.

Provider ↕	Model ↕	Input (per 1M tokens) ↕	Output (per 1M tokens) ↕	Context Window ↕	Best For ↕

🏆 Best Budget Model

GPT-4.1 Nano ($0.10 input)

🏆 Best Value Model

Claude Sonnet 4 ($3.00 input)

🏆 Best for Reasoning

o3 ($2.00 input)

🏆 Best Long Context

Llama 4 Scout (10M context)

How to Choose the Right AI Model

The cheapest model is not always the cheapest workflow. If a bargain model produces weak answers that force extra retries, longer prompts, or heavy manual cleanup, your real cost can end up higher than a more capable option.

Start with the minimum quality tier that reliably solves the job. For routing, extraction, classification, tagging, lightweight summarization, or bulk enrichment, budget models are often enough. For coding, multi-step reasoning, detailed analysis, and long context tasks, it can make sense to pay more for consistency.

Context window matters when you need to pass large documents, long conversations, knowledge bases, or bigger code repositories into the prompt. But bigger context is only useful if the model can actually reason over that input well and if the economics still work at your scale.

Need a usage estimate? Try our AI Token Calculator. Want to justify spend to leadership? Use the AI ROI Calculator to translate model costs into business outcomes.

FAQ

How should I choose the right AI model?

Balance quality, speed, context window, reliability, and budget. The best model is the one that solves your specific task with the lowest total workflow cost.

Is the cheapest model always the best value?

No. The cheapest model can become expensive if it causes retries, poor outputs, or more human editing time.

When does a long context window matter?

It matters for large documents, retrieval-heavy workflows, conversation memory, and long codebases where lots of context must be processed at once.