API or subscription: which costs less?

Official API prices per million tokens, with sources (checked 2026-10-20), and a calculator. Enter your monthly token use. It shows your API cost and the usage at which each plan's flat price becomes cheaper.

Read this first (assumptions):

Subscriptions cost less only if your usage fits inside the plan's limits, and vendors do not publish those limits in tokens. A break-even point is a price comparison, not a promise that the plan covers that much.
Standard tier only: no batch discounts, no fast/priority surcharges, no cache-write charges, no long-context surcharges (OpenAI above 272K input, Claude Haiku 5.5 above 100K). These all change the API cost.
The token amounts in the form are example values. Use your own: /usage in Claude Code or Codex, planlimits status in the CLI, or your API dashboard.
Plan prices are monthly list prices from our plan data. Gemini Code Assist is priced per user.

Model:

Input tokens per month (millions): Output tokens per month (millions): Share of input from cache (%):

Example values only (agent coding sends a lot of repeated context, so most input is usually cache reads). Replace them with your own numbers.

API prices (USD per 1M tokens, standard tier)

Anthropic (Claude API)

Model	Input	Cached input	Output
Claude Fable 5.1	$10	$0.25	$50
Claude Opus 5.5	$4	$0.20	$20
Claude Sonnet 5.5	$2	$0.10	$10
Claude Haiku 5.5 (prompts up to 100k tokens)	$0.10	$0.01	$0.50

Cache hits on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 are 0.05x input; on Fable 5.1 0.025x. Claude 4.7+ models use a tokenizer that produces about 30% more tokens for the same text (per Anthropic). platform.claude.com checked 2026-10-20

OpenAI API

Model	Input	Cached input	Output
gpt-6-astra	$10	$1	$50
gpt-6.1-sol	$2	$0.10	$10
gpt-6-sol	$2	$0.20	$10
gpt-6-luna	$0.10	$0.01	$0.50

Short-context prices (up to 272K input tokens). Long context costs more. developers.openai.com checked 2026-10-20

Google Gemini API

Model	Input	Cached input	Output
Gemini 4 Argon	$2 until 2026-11-30, then $4	$0.10, then $0.20	$10, then $20
Gemini 3.8 Flash	$0.75 until 2026-12-31, then $1.50	$0.075, then $0.15	$3.75, then $7.50

Promotional prices with published end dates: Gemini 4 Argon $2/$10 through 2026-11-30, then $4/$20; Gemini 3.8 Flash $0.75/$3.75 through 2026-12-31, then $1.50/$7.50. Output includes thinking tokens. ai.google.dev checked 2026-10-20