Price per 1M tokens is meaningless

TLDR · 1 week ago

Different AI models use different tokenizers, so the same text consumes different numbers of tokens across models—for example, this article required 160 tokens in GPT-4o but 200 in GPT-4, making per-token price comparisons unreliable. DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $0.04–$0.05 per benchmark task despite appearing cheaper per token, while Claude Sonnet 5 performs worse than Claude Opus 4.8 yet costs more per completed task due to lower token efficiency. Companies selecting AI models based solely on per-token pricing will make poor decisions and end up paying more for worse performance, since actual token efficiency and output quality vary significantly across models.