I Tracked LLM Pricing for 8 Weeks. Here's What the Data Shows.

The Problem That Started This

A few months ago, I was building an AI product and hit a wall: Which LLM should we use?

The question sounds simple. But the pricing landscape for AI models shifts constantly and without warning. OpenAI has 69 models listed on their pricing page. Google has 18. Anthropic launched three new Claude versions in the span of weeks. By the time I had compared options and made a decision, I had no confidence the numbers were still current.

I checked pricing pages. I checked docs. I found no single place that told me:

• What did this cost last week vs. today?
• Which providers actually changed their prices recently?
• How wide is the spread for comparable models?

So I automated it. Starting April 24, 2026, I built a daily scraper that pulls pricing data from every major provider. Here is what 8 weeks of data actually shows.

Finding 1: The Big Providers Did Not Move

The headline finding is not dramatic: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, and xAI all held their prices flat for the entire 59-day period. Not a single price change detected across those five providers.

That is useful information on its own. If you are budgeting around these providers, your cost model from April is still accurate today.

Here is the current pricing snapshot for the most-used models, accurate as of June 22:

Finding 2: The Pricing Spread is Enormous

The bigger story is not volatility. It is the 600x price range that now exists across the tracked catalog, from sub-cent inference to frontier flagship models.

Groq's Llama 3.1 8B costs $0.05 per million input tokens. GPT-4 Turbo costs $10.00 (200x). GPT-5.4 Pro costs $30.00 (600x). All three are in our dataset today. DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.44 per million input tokens consistently ranks near the top on reasoning benchmarks at a fraction of the flagship price.

The question teams should be asking is not just “which model is best?” but “which model is best for this specific task given the cost?” For many production workloads, the answer is not the model you started with.

Finding 3: All 5 Price Changes Came from One Provider

Over 59 days, our scraper detected 5 pricing changes across all 1,111 models. Every single one was on Together AI, a hosting aggregator that runs third-party open-source models.

The biggest move: Qwen37-max dropped 50% overnight on May 27, with no public announcement that reached mainstream channels. Teams running that model through Together AI saw their costs cut in half. Teams not monitoring pricing had no idea.

Three models saw price increases on June 2: Qwen3.5-9B (+70%), Llama-3.3-70B-Turbo (+18%), and Meta-Llama-3-8B-Lite (+40%). Not all pricing movement favors the buyer.

Finding 4: No Provider Notifies You Directly

Across all 5 detected changes, the announcement path was the same: nothing sent directly to users. One change (DeepSeek-V4-Pro via Together) appeared in a provider blog post days later. The rest were silent.

Compare that to how other infrastructure pricing works:

• AWS sends email notifications for pricing changes to affected customers
• Stripe gives 30 days notice before any fee changes
• Twilio posts a public changelog and emails account owners

LLM providers are operating more like spot markets than enterprise software. Prices move when they move. Most teams find out on their invoice.

What I Built

After a few weeks of running this manually, I automated it and opened it up. Token Prices tracks 1,100+ models across 33 providers daily and surfaces changes the moment they happen.

The tool gives you:

1. 1A live pricing dashboard across all tracked providers and models
2. 2A price change feed showing every detected move with before/after prices
3. 3Historical data going back to April 24, 2026 (the full dataset)
4. 4A REST API so you can pull pricing into your own FinOps tooling

The free tier covers the 10 major providers. Paid plans add historical depth, more providers, and API access. tokenprices.io