#llm-pricing

Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 and SpaceXAI's Grok 4.5 launched a day apart — two cheap, agentic value models. We compare price, context, tool use and coding.

Meta enters the paid model-API market with Muse Spark 1.1 — a $1.25/$4.25, 1M-context agent model that tops tool-use benchmarks but trails on pure coding.

Grok 4.5, Opus 4.8, and GPT-5.5 compared on benchmarks, cost, context, and reliability — an honest, source-checked read on which model wins which job.

SpaceXAI shipped Grok 4.5 on July 8: co-trained with Cursor, $2/$6 per Mtok, 4.2x fewer tokens than Opus 4.8. Where it fits an agency stack.

Dev shops quote $8K-$500K for the same 'simple agent' with no math. Our itemized 2026 index: stated-assumption build and monthly run costs you can recompute.

Anthropic shipped Claude Sonnet 5 on June 30, 2026. Its most agentic Sonnet yet lands near Opus 4.8 on coding and knowledge work at roughly half the price.

Uber burned a year's AI budget in four months; Microsoft cut Claude Code. A 4-gate playbook that right-sizes model spend and cuts AI bills 60 to 80 percent.

We compare Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on coding, agents, reasoning, and real cost — including where GPT-5.5 still wins and which model fits which job.

Forecast monthly LLM token spend by client tier, workflow, model mix. Downloadable forecasting model + reconciliation cadence for agency CFOs.

Side-by-side input, output, cached, and batch pricing for 30 frontier and open-weight models across 12 providers. Updated April 2026 with 200+ price points.

Xiaomi's MiMo-V2-Pro has 1T+ parameters with 42B active, ranking #8 worldwide. $1/$3 per million tokens. Complete model guide and deployment.

GPT-5.4 Nano at $0.20 per million input tokens is OpenAI's cheapest model. API-only, designed for classification, extraction, and subagents.

Qwen 3.5 medium series: Flash, 35B-A3B, 122B-A10B, and 27B. Benchmarks vs GPT-5 mini and Claude Sonnet 4.5, pricing from $0.10/M tokens.