How this works
How we verify a price
Most of the value of this site is in what it refuses to publish. These are the rules the pipeline runs under, not a description written afterwards — and where a rule and the code disagree, the code is the bug.
The rules
A price counts only if the exact figure appears verbatim on the vendor’s own cited page.
Never from memory, never from a news article, never from a screenshot. The figure has to be on the page we link, in that model’s own row — a price in a neighbouring row cannot confirm this one.
A price the vendor does not publish is “not published”. Never 0, never estimated.
Zero means free, and free is the most damaging thing to get wrong on a pricing site. A blank cell and a dash read as free too, so the words are spelled out.
If two sources disagree, both figures are shown and neither is chosen.
Picking a winner would be inventing a fact out of a disagreement. Those models are kept out of the table and listed as unconfirmed, with both figures and both sources.
A source that is blocked, rate-limited or errors is recorded by name, and skipped.
We never work around a block and never try a second route to the same page. The failures are published, because a silent gap is a lie.
Every item says where it came from.
A figure read off a vendor page and a figure taken from a price database are different kinds of claim, and the badge beside each one says which it is.
Nothing about any reader is sent anywhere.
All fetching happens once a week in a throwaway build runner, never from your browser. Reading this page does not call a vendor, and this site cannot amplify its traffic onto one.
The four evidence levels
Every figure carries one, and it is a glyph and a word rather than a colour, so it still reads for anyone who cannot distinguish the hues.
| Badge | What it means | In the catalogue |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor page | Both figures appeared verbatim on the vendor’s own page, in this model’s own row. | 50 |
| Corroborated | Two independent price databases agree. The vendor’s own page did not confirm it. | 14 |
| One source | One price database lists it and nothing else corroborates it. | — |
| Sources disagree | Sources give different figures. Both are shown and neither was chosen. | — |
Only the first two are allowed into the table. The other two are published at unconfirmed models, labelled, because a database listing a model is real information and is not evidence of a price.
How old a figure is allowed to get
Every price shows when it was last confirmed. Past 45 days it is marked as due a check; past twice that, the page says to verify it on the vendor’s own page. The cost calculator refuses to price a workload from a figure the vendor does not publish at all, rather than filling the gap with an assumption.
What this site does not do
- No affiliate links, anywhere, ever. Nothing here earns a commission on a choice.
- No benchmark scores. Most published figures are self-reported by the vendor and would need a caveat longer than the number.
- No “best model” ranking. What is best depends on the job, which is what use cases is for.
- No prices for image, audio or video models. They are charged per image, per minute or per character, so putting them in a Per million tokens (How model prices are quoted: dollars per million tokens, charged separately for what you send and what comes back.) table would misrepresent them.
Found a mistake?
A wrong price is the worst thing that can be on this site, and the fastest way to fix one is to be told. Say which model, what the vendor’s page shows, and link the page.