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OpenAI vs Anthropic vs Google: Complete API Pricing Breakdown

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are the three dominant forces in the LLM API market. Choosing between them isn't just about model quality — pricing varies dramatically across tiers and use cases. Here's the complete breakdown.

Pricing at a Glance

All prices are per 1 million tokens as of April 2026:

Use Case 1: Customer Support Chatbot

Typical request: ~500 input tokens, ~200 output tokens, 10,000 requests/day.

Use Case 2: Code Generation

Typical request: ~1,000 input tokens, ~2,000 output tokens, 1,000 requests/day.

Use Case 3: Document Analysis

Typical request: ~10,000 input tokens, ~500 output tokens, 500 requests/day.

Context Window Comparison

• GPT-4o: 128K tokens
• Claude Sonnet 4: 200K tokens
• Gemini 2.5 Pro: 1M tokens
• GPT-4o mini: 128K tokens
• Claude Haiku 4.5: 200K tokens
• Gemini 2.0 Flash: 1M tokens

Google dominates on context window. If you're processing long documents, Gemini's 1M context eliminates the need for chunking entirely.

The Verdict

For budget-conscious teams: Gemini 2.0 Flash is the cheapest option across every use case. For premium quality at a fair price: Gemini 2.5 Pro offers the best input pricing. For ecosystem and tooling: OpenAI GPT-4o has the broadest third-party support. For safety and alignment: Anthropic Claude leads in responsible AI.

The right choice depends on your priorities. Use our cost calculator to model your exact usage and find the cheapest provider for your specific workload.