How Much Does 1 Million AI Tokens Cost?
Short answer: $0.30–$5.00 per million input tokens and $2.50–$30.00 per million output tokens across the major hosted models. Output is where the money goes — here is the full table, a live calculator, and how to pay less.
1M token cost by model
Standard on-demand text rates per 1,000,000 tokens. Caching, batch and long-context rules can change the real bill — check the notes and the linked official sources.
| Model | 1M input tokens | 1M output tokens | Context window | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GPT-5.6 Sol OpenAI | $5.00 | $30.00 | 1,050,000 | OpenAI |
GPT-5.6 Terra OpenAI | $2.50 | $15.00 | 1,050,000 | OpenAI |
GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI | $1.00 | $6.00 | 1,050,000 | OpenAI |
Claude Opus 5 Anthropic | $5.00 | $25.00 | 1,000,000 | Anthropic |
Claude Sonnet 5 Anthropic | $2.00 * | $10.00 * | 1,000,000 | Anthropic |
Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200,000 | Anthropic |
Gemini 3.6 Flash Google | $1.50 | $7.50 | 1,048,576 | |
Gemini 3.5 Flash-LiteLowest Google | $0.30 | $2.50 | 1,048,576 |
* Claude Sonnet 5 introductory pricing of $2.00/$10.00 runs through Aug 31, 2026, then moves to $3.00/$15.00. OpenAI GPT-5.6 models bill higher long-context rates on prompts over 272K input tokens. Prices are informational estimates in USD; the provider invoice is the source of truth.
Price any token volume
Prefilled with 1,000,000 input tokens. Adjust input and output volumes to model your real workload.
| Model | Input cost | Output cost | Total |
|---|
Why 1M output tokens cost 3–8x more than 1M input tokens.
Reading your prompt is cheap; writing the answer is expensive. Input tokens are processed in parallel in one pass, while output tokens are generated one at a time, each requiring a full model forward pass. Providers price that asymmetry directly into the rate card.
Practical takeaway: workloads that are output-heavy (long-form writing, code generation, detailed analysis) cost far more than input-heavy workloads (classification, extraction, short answers) at the same total token count. When you estimate a budget, always split input and output — never price "1M tokens" as a single blended number.
What does 1 million tokens actually look like?
For English text, one token averages roughly 0.75 words, so 1M tokens is about 750,000 words — around 1,500 book pages, 3–4 full novels, or roughly 4 MB of plain text. Chinese, Japanese and Korean text tokenizes denser, often near one token per character, so 1M tokens covers closer to 950,000 CJK characters.
In workload terms: a customer-support bot exchanging ~2,000 tokens per conversation burns 1M tokens every 500 conversations. A coding assistant sending a 50K-token repository snapshot per request spends 1M tokens in just 20 requests. Use the Tokens ↔ Words converter for exact planning numbers.
Five ways to cut the cost of your next 1M tokens
The headline rate is rarely what heavy users actually pay. These levers routinely cut real bills by 30–80%.
1M token cost questions
How much does 1 million input tokens cost?
Between $0.30 and $5.00 at standard rates among the models tracked on this page — from Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite at $0.30 up to GPT-5.6 Sol and Claude Opus 5 at $5.00 per million input tokens.
How much does 1 million output tokens cost?
Between $2.50 and $30.00 per million output tokens. Output is billed 3–8x higher than input because generation is the expensive part of inference.
Is 1 million tokens a lot?
For English text it is roughly 750,000 words — about 1,500 pages. For a chatbot it equals hundreds to thousands of conversations; for a coding tool sending large repository context, it can disappear in a few dozen requests.
Do cached or batch tokens cost less?
Yes. Most providers discount repeated prompt prefixes (prompt caching) and offline batch jobs, often by 50% or more. This page shows standard on-demand rates, so heavy workloads usually cost less than the headline number.
Will these prices change?
Yes — LLM pricing has consistently moved down over time, and providers adjust rates and model lineups regularly. We re-verify against official pricing pages weekly; the "Last verified" date at the top shows the latest check.
Where these numbers come from.
All rates are taken from official provider pricing pages and re-verified weekly. The calculator multiplies your token volumes by the published per-million-token rates; it does not estimate tokenization itself and does not apply caching, batch or tiered discounts unless noted.
Official sources: OpenAI model docs, Anthropic pricing, Google Gemini API pricing. Always confirm the provider invoice before making purchasing decisions.