Understanding LLM API Pricing & Token Economics
When scaling AI agents and LLM applications, API pricing models vary dramatically between providers and input vs output token ratios. Output tokens typically cost 3x to 4x more than input tokens due to autoregressive generation overhead.
Model Pricing Benchmarks Modeled:
- OpenAI GPT-4o: $5.00 / 1M Input — $15.00 / 1M Output
- Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet: $3.00 / 1M Input — $15.00 / 1M Output
- Google Gemini 1.5 Pro: $1.25 / 1M Input — $5.00 / 1M Output
- Meta Llama 3.3 70b (Hosted): $0.59 / 1M Input — $0.79 / 1M Output