What AI actually costs right now: eight models, compared on live pricing
EditorialBy TrustList Editorial
Seven of the eight models with confirmed current pricing sit in a tight $6-10 output band. Two of the eight had their price move since launch — in opposite directions.
About What AI actually costs right now: eight models, compared on live pricing
Restrict TrustList's AI-model board to the models carrying real, current pricing — eight of them, as of 31 August 2026 — and a genuine pattern shows up: the frontier got cheap fast.
The eight, ranked by output price
| Model | Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | $0.75 | $3.75 | 1M | |
| o3 | OpenAI | $2.00 | $8.00 | 200K |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 | $10.00 | 1M | |
| GPT-4o | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128K |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | $2.00 | $10.00 | 1M |
| Qwen3.8-Max | Alibaba | $2.00 | $6.00 | 1M |
| Grok 4.6 | xAI | $2.00 | $6.00 | 500K |
| Claude Opus 5 | Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1M |
Seven of the eight sit within a tight $6-10 output-price band. Only Claude Opus 5 — Anthropic's actual flagship, not its mid-tier model — sits well above it, and even that is roughly half what a top-tier model cost a year earlier.
Two prices that moved since they were first set — and why that matters
o3 launched at $10 input / $40 output. It now runs at $2/$8 — a fifth of the original rate, following OpenAI's July 2026 price cuts. Claude Sonnet 5 was scheduled to rise from $2/$10 to $3/$15 on 1 September 2026; Anthropic cancelled that increase, so the launch price is still the current one.
Neither of those facts would show up in a snapshot pulled from an old announcement or a stale seed dataset — both numbers changed after launch, in opposite directions. It's a concrete reason to treat "current API pricing" as something to re-check at the point of use, not something to memorize from a launch-day headline.
What buying $10-per-million actually gets you now
A year or two ago, $10 per million output tokens was near the top of the market. Today it buys Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet 5 — three models from three different labs, each with real production traction, each offering at least 128K tokens of context and two of the three offering a full 1M. The genuine premium tier — Claude Opus 5 at $25 output — is now a deliberate choice for specific, harder work, not the default entry point it once was.
The honest limit of this list
Eight models is not the whole board — it's the fraction of 88 that currently carries a verified, sourced price. Most of the board's models don't yet, and a blank price field means "not yet documented," not "free" or "unpriced by design." Treat this table as a snapshot of what's confirmed, not a comprehensive market survey — and re-check the number before committing a production budget to it, given how much movement just these eight prices have already shown.
Pricing confirmed live on 31 August 2026, sourced per model: Gemini 3.7 Flash, o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 5, Qwen3.8-Max, Grok 4.6, Claude Opus 5.
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