OpenRouter pricing looks simple on the model pages: the per-token price is the provider’s own list price, with no markup. The catch is what that sentence leaves out. You pay a 5.5% fee when you load credits, and for many models OpenRouter does not send your request to the company that made the model. It…

Gemini Embedding 2 costs $0.20 per million tokens. OpenAI’s text-embedding-3-small costs $0.02. That is a tenfold difference on the model that decides which of your pages a chatbot reads before it answers, and the pricing page cannot tell you whether the extra money buys better answers. So on 12 October we embedded our entire site,…

OpenAI now sells three speeds for GPT-6.1 Sol. Standard is the normal rate. Fast mode, the tier that used to be called Priority processing, costs twice as much. Ultrafast, which OpenAI added for GPT-6.1 Sol this week, costs six times as much: $12 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens, against $2…

Mistral released Mistral Large 4 as a public preview on 6 October 2026 and priced it at half its list rate: $0.68 per million input tokens and $2.09 per million output tokens, against a list price of $1.36 and $4.18. Mistral’s changelog says the launch pricing is “50% off for 2 weeks”. That points to…

On 7 October 2026 Anthropic cut the price of a cache read on Claude Sonnet 5.5 from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens. Input, output and cache writes stayed where they were. Coverage of the change carried Anthropic’s framing that Sonnet 5.5 becomes about 20% cheaper on most agentic work. A WordPress chatbot is not…

Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, a tenth of what Claude Haiku 4.5 charges. That is also exactly what OpenAI charges for GPT-6 Luna, so on paper the two cheapest models from the two biggest labs now cost the same. On a WordPress chatbot they do…

OpenAI launched the Decisions API in public beta on 6 October 2026. It does one narrow job: you send text (or an image) and a short list of questions, and it returns typed answers, such as a yes/no probability, one choice from a fixed list, or a score on a scale. It runs only on…

GLM-5.3 has one official price: Z.ai charges $1.40 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.26. But GLM-5.3 is an open-weight model, and on 6 October 2026 OpenRouter listed 41 endpoints for it from 32 different hosts. Their input prices ran from $0.03 to $2.80 per million. If…

Mistral’s API price list has an odd shape this autumn. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. Mistral Large 3 costs $0.50 and $1.50. So the model called Medium is three times the price of the model called Large on input and five times on output. If…

Claude Haiku 4.5 costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, exactly half of Claude Sonnet 5.5’s $2 and $10. On a WordPress chatbot it costs a lot less than half. We sent both models the same support questions from our production server on 4 October 2026, and Haiku 4.5 came…