What changed in AI API pricing this week — and what it means for your budget.
OpenAI launched GPT-5.4 mini at $0.75 input / $4.50 output per 1M tokens. Priced between GPT-4o mini and GPT-4o, it delivers significantly better reasoning than its predecessor while remaining OpenAI's most cost-effective new-gen model. For chatbots, content generation, and data extraction that need stronger reasoning than GPT-4o mini could offer.
The new flagship from OpenAI. GPT-5.4 Pro targets complex reasoning, code generation, and agentic workflows at $30.00 input / $180.00 output per 1M tokens. Premium pricing positions it alongside Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 Pro for the most demanding workloads.
Google's answer to the price war. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite at $0.25 input / $1.50 output per 1M tokens is one of the cheapest multimodal models from a major provider. Perfect for high-volume tasks like classification, routing, and simple Q&A where cost matters most.
Anthropic has retired Claude 4 from its API. If you're still pointing at claude-4, you need to migrate. Claude 4.5 is the direct successor (same price, better performance). Sonnet 5 is the new mid-tier champion at $3/$15 per 1M tokens.
Twelve months ago, the cheapest API model from a major provider was ~$0.15/1M input tokens. Today, GPT-oss 20B is at $0.08, Mistral Small at $0.10, and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite at $0.10. The "good enough for most tasks" price has nearly halved in a year. If you locked in pricing assumptions 6 months ago, you're overpaying.
While budget models race to the bottom, premium-tier pricing (GPT-5.4 Pro, Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5 Pro) remains at $5-30 input / $25-180 output per 1M tokens. The gap between "cheap" and "best" is now 30-600x. This creates a clear optimization opportunity: route simple tasks to cheap models, reserve premium for complex reasoning.
Get the API Pricing Digest delivered every Friday. No spam — just pricing intelligence.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime. We respect your inbox.
This is the first edition. More coming every Friday.
APIpulse Pro monitors 49 models across 10 providers. Get alerts when prices drop — or when your costs are about to increase.
Get Pro for $19 (reg $29) →