AI API Providers: Complete Pricing Guide (2026)
Compare AI API providers side by side. Browse all 16 providers below to see their model offerings, pricing ranges, and capabilities. Click any provider to view their full pricing table and model comparison.
All AI API Providers
OpenAI
OpenAI is the creator of the GPT series and o-series reasoning models, offering the industry's most widely used AI APIs with broad ecosystem support.
Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety company that develops the Claude family of models, known for long context windows, prompt caching, and strong instruction-following.
Google offers the Gemini family of multimodal models via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI, featuring some of the largest context windows and competitive pricing.
Mistral AI
Mistral AI is a European AI company offering a range of efficient and capable language models, including their frontier Large model and specialized code model Codestral.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab offering high-performance open-source models at extremely competitive prices, with off-peak discounts of 50-75%.
Cohere
Cohere specializes in enterprise NLP, offering Command models for text generation and Embed models for semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation.
Together AI
Together AI is a cloud platform for running open-source models including Meta's Llama series, offering competitive inference pricing with fine-tuning support.
Groq
Groq provides ultra-fast LLM inference using custom LPU hardware, delivering the fastest token generation speeds on the market for open-source models.
OpenRouter
AI model aggregator providing unified API access to 200+ models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Qwen, and more with transparent per-token pricing and automatic fallback routing.
Fireworks AI
Fireworks AI delivers production-grade inference for open-source models with industry-leading speed and competitive per-token pricing, including serverless and dedicated deployment options.
Perplexity
Perplexity offers search-augmented Sonar models that combine LLM reasoning with real-time web search, making them uniquely suited for queries requiring current information.
Cerebras
Cerebras delivers the world's fastest LLM inference using custom wafer-scale chips, achieving up to 3,000 tokens/second — roughly 20x faster than GPU-based providers — at competitive prices.
AWS Bedrock
Amazon Bedrock is AWS's fully managed service for accessing foundation models from Anthropic, Meta, Mistral, Amazon, and others through a single unified API. It integrates natively with AWS infrastructure, supports VPC endpoints for private connectivity, and offers enterprise features like model customization, guardrails, and AWS IAM-based access control.
Azure OpenAI
Azure OpenAI Service provides enterprise-grade access to OpenAI models (GPT-4o, GPT-5, o3, o4-mini) through Microsoft Azure infrastructure with Azure AD authentication, VNet integration, content filtering, and data residency compliance for regulated industries.
SambaNova
SambaNova Cloud delivers ultra-fast AI inference on custom-built DataScale chips, achieving some of the highest tokens-per-second throughput in the industry. Specializes in serving open-source models like Llama and DeepSeek at competitive prices with enterprise-grade reliability.
Nvidia NIM
NVIDIA NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) provides optimized AI model deployment through NVIDIA's infrastructure. Features Nemotron foundation models and optimized versions of open-source models, leveraging NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM for maximum inference performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
How to Choose an AI API Provider
Choosing the right AI API provider depends on your use case, budget, required features, and existing infrastructure. The major providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral AI, and others — all offer competitive pricing, but differ significantly in model capabilities, context window sizes, and optional features like prompt caching and batch processing.
For cost-sensitive, high-volume workloads, focus on input and output token prices and whether the provider supports batch API processing (typically 50% off standard prices). For quality-critical applications, compare the premium and reasoning-tier models across providers. For multimodal workloads requiring image or document understanding, verify vision support on each model.
All prices shown are in USD per 1 million tokens ($/M tokens), the industry-standard unit for AI API pricing. Use our interactive calculator to compute your exact monthly cost based on your token usage and request volume, or browse head-to-head model comparisons for detailed side-by-side analysis.
Find the Right Model for Your Use Case
Not sure which provider to choose? Browse use case guides that recommend the most cost-effective models for specific workloads.
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