AI Pricing Analysis
AI Is Getting Cheaper. But Are Businesses Really Saving Money?
AI Wallet
OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral are competing to make AI more affordable. Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for shorter prompts, while Mistral offers Z.ai GLM 5.3 Flash at $0.15 input and $0.50 output. These prices make it possible for businesses to process millions of pieces of text for relatively little money. But there is a catch: the cheapest model is not always the one that completes the work at the lowest cost.
Claude Haiku 5.5’s listed rates apply to prompts up to 100,000 tokens; longer prompts cost more ($0.50 input / $2.50 output per 1M tokens). GPT-6 Luna rates are OpenAI’s standard short-context prices. Caching, batch and regional options are not included.
The estimate multiplies token volume by list price only. The lowest token bill is not proof of the lowest cost per completed task — retries, answer quality and caching can change what you actually pay.
The real question is how much a business pays to finish a task. A cheaper model might need more attempts, while a more expensive model could complete the same work faster. Caching, which allows AI to reuse previously processed information at a lower price, can also change the final bill. For companies, comparing AI prices should therefore go beyond the advertised cost per million tokens. The important number is the cost of getting useful work done.