AI API Price Trends: What the Tracker Actually Recorded
Every article about AI pricing says "prices keep falling." Few can show you receipts. We snapshot the price of every model we track (302 of them) every single day, and this page is computed directly from those snapshots — every number below is a recorded change, not a vibe. Tracking since Aug 2, last updated 2026-08-23.
The headline numbers
- 55 of 302 models repriced at least once in our window — ~18% of the market moved within weeks.
- 66 cuts vs 60 increases — the direction is down, but not uniformly: increases are real and usually unannounced.
- Median cut: -21% on the output rate — these are not rounding adjustments; they are decisions that change which tier wins your workload.
The biggest cuts on record
| Model | Date | Output /1M before | Output /1M after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alibaba (Qwen) Qwen3 14B | Aug 10 | $0.91 | $0.24 | -74% |
| DeepSeek DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 | Aug 22 | $3.20 | $0.8951 | -72% |
| Z.ai (GLM) GLM 5.2 | Aug 9 | $0.792 | $0.22 | -72% |
| OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol Pro | Aug 21 | $30.00 | $10.00 | -67% |
| OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol | Aug 21 | $30.00 | $10.00 | -67% |
| OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol Pro (batch) | Aug 21 | $15.00 | $5.00 | -67% |
Every model page on this site now carries its own price history section (for example, the biggest mover above: Qwen3 14B price history) — check it before hard-coding any rate into a budget.
Why prices move this fast
- Inference costs keep collapsing: better kernels, speculative decoding, and cheaper hardware-per-token pass through to list prices with a lag — the vendor who passes it through first buys market share.
- Open-weight pressure: when a hosted open model matches a proprietary tier's quality at a fifth of the price, the proprietary tier reprices or bleeds volume — visible in how often budget tiers move versus flagships.
- Family repricing: vendors rarely cut one model — they re-anchor a whole lineup at once, which is why our biggest-cuts table often clusters by vendor and date.
What to do with this information
- Re-shop monthly. The cheapest-APIs ranking recomputes daily; a routing decision older than a quarter is running on stale assumptions.
- Watch your model's page. Each model's history section shows when it last moved — a recent cut on a sibling tier is a signal to re-run your comparison in the API cost calculator.
- Budget with a corridor, not a point. Given the median cut above, a conservative budget assumes today's rate while an honest forecast allows for downside in your favor — the opposite of most cloud line items.