LLM API Providers Software Pricing 2026

LLM API providers offer access to large language models via API, enabling developers to add AI capabilities to applications without hosting models themselves. They charge per token (input and output) and compete on price, speed, model selection, and features like web search grounding or RAG optimization.

LLM API pricing is per-token and varies widely by model size and provider. Small models (under 8B parameters) cost $0.02-0.20 per million tokens on Groq, Together AI, and Mistral. Mid-range models cost $0.30-1.25 per million tokens (Gemini Flash, Mistral Medium). Frontier models (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro) cost $1-5 per million input tokens. Perplexity Sonar adds per-request fees on top of token costs.

For small open-source models, Groq (from $0.05/M tokens) and Mistral Nemo ($0.02/M) are the cheapest. For frontier-quality models, Mistral Large 3 at $0.50/$1.50 per million tokens is dramatically cheaper than GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet. Google Gemini Flash-Lite at $0.10/$0.40 per million tokens offers frontier quality at budget prices. Cohere Command R7B is cheapest for RAG at $0.037/M input tokens.

Google Gemini API offers the best free tier: 1,500 requests/day on Flash models through Google AI Studio with no credit card required. Groq offers a free API key with rate-limited access to all models. Mistral offers a free trial tier via La Plateforme. Cohere offers a free Trial API key for non-commercial use. Together AI and Fireworks AI offer $1 in free credits. Perplexity API has no free tier.

Most LLM APIs charge per token (input tokens + output tokens × rate). Perplexity API is unique in adding a per-request fee on top of token costs — every Sonar query incurs a $5-14 per 1,000 requests charge based on search context depth. This dual model reflects the cost of real-time web search bundled into each query. When comparing Perplexity to other APIs, you must add both token costs and request fees to get the true cost per query.