AI Pricing Index: What Every Model Costs Per Query

What You're Actually Paying Per AI Query

AI providers publish pricing in tokens, which is meaningless to most people. A token is roughly 3/4 of a word, so a 1,000-word response uses about 1,333 tokens. But you also pay for the input tokens (your prompt), and different models charge different rates for input versus output.

We converted all the major model pricing into cost per query for a typical interaction: a 100-word prompt generating a 500-word response. These are API prices. Subscription prices are different, and we'll cover those too.

API Cost Per Query (March 2026)

Premium Models

Model	Cost Per Query	Quality Tier
Claude Opus	$0.048	Top tier
GPT-5	$0.042	Top tier
Gemini Ultra	$0.038	Top tier
Grok 3	$0.035	Near top tier

Mid-Range Models

Model	Cost Per Query	Quality Tier
Claude Sonnet	$0.012	High
GPT-4o	$0.008	High
Gemini Pro	$0.007	High
Mistral Large	$0.010	High

Budget Models

Model	Cost Per Query	Quality Tier
DeepSeek V3	$0.003	Good
Mistral Medium	$0.004	Good
Llama 3.1 70B	$0.002	Good
Qwen 2.5 72B	$0.002	Good

The price range is enormous. A query to Claude Opus costs 24x more than one to Llama 3.1 70B. The quality difference doesn't justify a 24x price gap for most tasks, which is why smart routing between models saves real money.

Subscription Pricing: What You Actually Get

Subscription plans work differently from API pricing. You pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited (or high-limit) access. This is simpler but often less efficient.

Major Provider Subscriptions

Service	Price/Month	Models Included	Limits
ChatGPT Plus	$20	GPT-5, GPT-4o	Rate limits on GPT-5
Claude Pro	$20	Claude Opus, Sonnet	Rate limits on Opus
Gemini Advanced	$20	Gemini Ultra, Pro	Rate limits on Ultra

Aggregator Pricing

Service	Price/Month	Models Included	Limits
Admix Free	$0	Eligible free models	20 credits/day, with a free-tier fair-use cap
Admix Starter	$10 ($8/mo annually)	350+ AI models	500 credits/month
Admix Basic	$19 ($15/mo annually)	350+ AI models	1,500 credits/month
Admix Pro	$39 ($27/mo annually)	350+ AI models	4,000 credits/month
Admix Max	$99 ($79/mo annually)	350+ AI models	10,000 credits/month

Effective Cost Per Reply: Subscriptions

A flat per-query comparison is misleading because models and prompts have different provider costs. Admix charges weighted credits: a typical text reply is roughly 1–2 credits, image generation is 10 credits, and large prompts or premium models can use more. The model picker shows an estimate before you send, and the final charge follows actual usage.

That makes the plans easiest to compare by allowance: Starter covers 500 monthly credits, Basic 1,500, Pro 4,000, and Max 10,000. Users who choose lightweight models will get more replies from the same allowance than users who mostly run frontier reasoning models.

The Hidden Costs of Subscriptions

There are costs that don't show up in the monthly price:

Opportunity cost of wrong model selection. If you're subscribed to ChatGPT only but Claude would handle your analysis task better, you're getting a worse result. The "cost" is lower quality output, which might mean more time editing or revising.

Multiple subscription costs. Many serious users subscribe to two or three providers. At $20 each, that's $40-60/month. Admix's monthly plans range from $10 to $99, so the saving depends on the credit allowance you need rather than a promise of unlimited usage.

Unused capacity. If you pay $20/month and only use the service 10 times in a slow month, your effective cost per query is $2. That's 40x more than what the query actually costs the provider. Subscriptions penalize inconsistent usage.

Which Pricing Model Is Best for You?

Casual user: Start with the free allowance, then choose Admix Starter at $10/month if you need premium models or more credits.

Regular user: Starter or Basic provides 500–1,500 credits per month across the complete model catalog.

Power user: Pro provides 4,000 monthly credits and Max provides 10,000. A direct provider subscription may still make sense if nearly all your work stays with one model family.

Developer/API user: Pay-per-use API pricing is most efficient. Use different models for different tasks based on the quality-cost tradeoff that makes sense for each use case.

The Pricing Trend

AI model pricing has fallen consistently for three years and shows no signs of stopping. The models that cost $0.05 per query today will likely cost $0.01 per query in two years. Budget models will approach zero marginal cost.

This trend favors aggregators because they can pass cost savings through to users faster than providers who are anchored to $20/month subscription prices. If you're optimizing for cost, aggregation is already the better deal and will only improve.