Skip to content

Topic · Themes

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.

Filter in the library

  1. · Models

    Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1: agentic scores double and cache drops by 75%

    Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on 1 September, with a 75% drop in cache read pricing and sharply higher agentic scores. We analyse the release, the unusual structure of the two models, and what the distribution of gains reveals.
  2. · Society

    Half of the Fortune 500 now prefers open source over leased APIs

    According to Hugging Face's CEO, around half of major US companies now use open models rather than APIs. We analyse this shift and its three drivers.
  3. · Models

    It's happening today: the Sonnet 5 price increase takes effect, and it's steeper than 50%

    The promotional rate for Claude Sonnet 5 ends today. We explain why the real increase exceeds the advertised 50%, and what you should concretely check in your costs.
  4. · Models

    Meta bets on cheaper rather than better

    Meta is churning out code-focused models, betting on price rather than cutting-edge performance. We analyse this positioning and what it reveals about real-world usage.
  5. · Models

    New wave of price cuts: flagship models are becoming significantly cheaper

    OpenAI has cut the price of its most powerful model by more than 20%, with a promotion announced until November. Google and Meta are following similar strategies. We analyse this shift in the price war.
  6. · Models

    Grok 4.6 matches OpenAI's best model, with a pricing catch in the long context.

    xAI has launched Grok 4.6, which matches GPT-5.6 Sol Max on the Artificial Analysis index at the same price as the previous version. We explain the tiered context pricing mechanism, which catches many users out.
  7. · Models

    DeepSeek raises prices by 93%: has the price war hit rock bottom?

    DeepSeek raised the price of its Flash model by 93% on 14 August, while other players are still cutting theirs. We analyse what this reversal reveals about the real economics of inference.
  8. · Society

    The memory shortage threatening AI, and which is set to push up the price of your next phone

    The memory demand from AI data centers is putting strain on the entire market, with knock-on effects on consumer electronics prices. We explain the mechanism and its consequences.
  9. · Explainers

    Training and inference: the two costs of AI that everyone keeps confusing

    There's a lot of talk about the cost of training models, but rarely about the cost of their daily use. We explain the difference between training and inference, why the latter now dominates the AI economy, and what that implies.
  10. · Models

    OpenAI cuts its prices by 80%, and it's the model itself that figured out how

    On 4 August 2026, OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and that of Terra by 20%, explaining that these gains come from optimisations the model itself contributed to. We analyse what this loop reveals, and what it changes for developers.
  11. · Models

    DeepSeek releases a model at 14 cents per million tokens that beats its own high-end offering

    DeepSeek released a new version of its Flash model on 31 July 2026, priced at around $0.14 per million tokens, which scores 82.7% on Terminal-Bench and outperforms its own Pro model on several agentic tests. We analyse what this reversal means.
  12. · Explainers

    What is "prompt caching"? The setting that could halve your AI bill

    Prompt caching lets you avoid paying full price for the same context sent with every request. We explain the mechanism, the real savings, the pitfalls of cache lifetime, and why it's the first lever to pull before September's price hikes.
  13. · Business

    On 1 September, Claude Sonnet 5 increases by 50%. And there's a catch almost no one mentions.

    The promotional rate for Claude Sonnet 5 ends on 31 August 2026: from 1 September, input and output costs rise by 50%. But the real trap lies elsewhere: the new tokenizer counts more tokens for the same text. We explain the actual calculation and how to prepare now.
  14. · Explainers

    Why does your French cost more than English when you use an AI?

    For equivalent content, writing in French consumes more tokens than English, which increases cost and reduces the available space in the context window. We explain why this inequality exists, what it changes in practice, and how to limit it.
  15. · Models

    Kimi K3 burns through twelve times more reasoning tokens than Claude Opus: the hidden cost of thinking

    An analysis of Kimi K3's reasoning traces reveals it consumes more than twelve times as many reasoning tokens as Claude Opus 4.8. This is both the secret to its performance and its biggest economic flaw. We explain the mechanism, and why the price per token says nothing about the real cost.
  16. · Models

    Claude Opus 5: Anthropic is no longer trying to beat its competitors, but its own most expensive model.

    Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026, a model that approaches Fable 5's performance for half the price, at the unchanged rate of Opus 4.8. We break down the benchmarks, the effort dial that changes cost management, and what this positioning reveals about the new phase of the AI race.
  17. · Explainers

    What is a "reasoning model"? These AIs that take the time to think before answering

    Deep Think mode, reasoning effort, sub-agents: recent models no longer respond immediately, they think first. We explain what a reasoning model is, what actually happens during that pause, why it improves answers, and why it sends the bill through the roof.
  18. · Explainers

    What is the "context window"? The working memory that decides what your AI can actually understand

    The context window is the amount of information an AI can hold in mind at once. We explain this key concept simply, why it exploded in 2026 (up to 2 million tokens), and why a large context doesn't solve everything.
  19. · Models

    Claude Sonnet 5: Anthropic sells (almost) Opus-level power at a standard model price

    Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on 30 June 2026, the default model for Free and Pro. It comes close to Opus 4.8 on agentic tasks while costing 60% less during the launch period. We break down the figures, the strategy, and what to expect from it day to day.
  20. · Models

    GLM-5.2 versus Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5: China opens the floodgates while the West shuts its own

    On 13 June 2026, Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2 under the MIT licence, the day after Washington cut off Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We break down what this open model is worth against Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, and what it changes for the general public and for businesses alike.

Other topics in “Themes”

All the other topics

Every article, month by month →