Reference · Glossary
Cost per token
How providers **price API usage** — separate rates for input tokens (your prompt) and output tokens (the model's reply).
#When to use
Estimating monthly bills, comparing models, deciding when to cache or compress prompts.
#When not to
Local/open-weight models on your own GPU — you pay for hardware and electricity instead.
#Example
$0.15 / 1M input tokens + $0.60 / 1M output tokens → a 2K-in / 500-out chat ≈ $0.0006 per turn.