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AI prices and costs: all our articles

All 43 Alyriaz articles on the “AI prices and costs” topic: news, analysis and explainers, newest first. To stay up to date, you can get an alert as soon as a new article on this topic is published.

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  1. · Business

    Tech giants put their engineers on an AI diet

    Microsoft cuts its engineers' AI budget tenfold, Meta and Uber tighten the purse strings too. After the euphoria, companies are discovering the bill.
  2. · Models

    Claude Haiku 5.5: ten times cheaper than its predecessor

    Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, ten times cheaper than Haiku 4.5 for most requests, at the price of GPT-6 Luna. What it is really worth.
  3. · Applications

    Free Gemini: what changes on October 9

    From October 9, free Gemini only gets Flash-Lite, Google's smallest model. What changes, for whom, and whether it is worth paying.
  4. · Models

    Claude Sonnet 5.5: nearly Opus, at half the price

    Across 44 professions, Claude Sonnet 5.5 nearly matches Opus 5.5 at half the price. What it changes for you, and where the top model keeps its edge.
  5. · Vision

    The week AI prices melted

    Prices halved, AI bosses at the UN, incident at Google: if you haven't followed anything this week, here's the essentials in five minutes.
  6. · Models

    The model rankings as of 23 September 2026

    State of the model landscape as of 23 September 2026: who leads on what, at what price, and how to read leaderboards that have become hard to compare.
  7. · Models

    GPT-6 Sol and Luna: prices halved, the same evening as Opus 5.5

    OpenAI has released GPT-6 Sol and Luna with prices halved, just hours after Claude Opus 5.5. We analyse the figures, the tests where the new model regresses, and what this convergence means.
  8. · Models

    Opus 5.5: what actually changes compared with the previous one

    Beyond benchmarks, we detail what Opus 5.5 does differently from Opus 5 in practice: speed, token consumption, endurance on long tasks, and the shape of its answers.
  9. · Models

    Claude Opus 5.5: flagship-level performance for 60% less

    Anthropic has released Claude Opus 5.5, claimed to be on a par with Fable 5.1 at a far lower cost. We analyse the figures, the comparison with GPT-6 Astra, and the tension with the call for a slowdown.
  10. · Explainers

    How a model can process text, sound and images at the same time

    An omnimodal model handles several types of input within a single architecture. We explain the mechanism that makes this possible and what it implies.
  11. · Models

    Six hundred billion parameters at a dollar per million tokens

    StepFun has launched Step 5 Preview, a 600-billion-parameter model with a one-million-token context window, priced at 1 dollar for input. We put that rate into context within the current landscape.
  12. · Models

    GLM-5.3-Flash runs on 100,000 Chinese accelerators, at a comparable cost

    Z.ai has announced that its flagship open model is deployed on more than 100,000 Chinese accelerators, with throughput tripled in two weeks. We analyse what this claim implies if it is confirmed.
  13. · Models

    It starts today: weekly quotas come into force

    The weekly usage limits announced for an agentic coding tool take effect today. We explain the mechanism and what to check.
  14. · Explainers

    One image, how many tokens? Why we bill photos by the word

    Image models are billed in tokens, the same unit as text. We explain how an image is split into tokens, why editing costs double, and how to reduce your bill.
  15. · Explainers

    What model size for which use case?

    Most tasks don't require the most powerful model. We explain which size suits which use case, and why choosing too large costs more without adding anything.
  16. · Explainers

    All the September deadlines: what changes, and when

    Several pricing changes and service closures take effect in September 2026. Here's a round-up of the confirmed dates, what they involve, and what you need to check beforehand.
  17. · Models

    Transcription drops to ten cents an hour

    Microsoft has released a speech recognition model at $0.10 per hour of audio, down 72% in five months, covering sixty languages. We analyse what this collapse in costs makes possible.
  18. · Models

    Three providers restructure their usage limits within two weeks

    In two weeks, three major providers have changed the structure of their usage limits. We explain these mechanisms, why they are multiplying, and how to measure what you are actually paying.
  19. · Explainers

    What is a model's "effort level"? The setting that changes everything and that nobody looks at

    Recent models offer a reasoning-effort setting that profoundly changes their outputs and cost. Here’s what this parameter does, why comparisons depend on it, and how to tune it.
  20. · Explainers

    Build or buy your AI tool: the decision framework

    Agentic coding tools make internal development more accessible. Here is a practical decision framework for choosing between building and buying an AI tool.

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