Every AI Model's Real Cost in 2026: The Complete Developer Pricing Guide

AI model pricing in 2026 is chaos. GPT-5 Nano costs $0.05 per million tokens. Claude Opus 4.6 costs $25 per million output tokens. That's a 500x price difference. Which one should you use? It depends on what you're doing — and most developers are massively overpaying because they don't know the options. This is the guide I wish I had when I started building with AI APIs. The Full Pricing Table (February 2026) Sorted cheapest to most expensive by output price: Model Provider Input/1M Output/1M Context Best For GPT-5 Nano OpenAI $0.05 $0.40 400K Classification, extraction, simple Q&A Gemini 2.0 Flash Google $0.10 $0.40 1M Fast tasks, agentic workflows GPT-4o-mini OpenAI $0.15 $0.60 128K Budget all-rounder Gemini 2.5 Flash Google $0.15 $0.60 1M Fast reasoning, thinking mode available Mistral Small 3.1 Mistral $0.20 $0.60 128K Latency-sensitive tasks, open-source Llama 4 Maverick Meta ~$0.15 ~$0.60 1M Open-source, self-hostable DeepSeek V3 DeepSeek $0.56 $1.68 128K Coding, general purpose,