Cheapest AI APIs in 2026: Every Model Ranked by Cost

Looking for the cheapest AI API? I got tired of checking 7 different pricing pages every time I needed to pick a model, so I built AI Pricing Guru — a free comparison tool that tracks token costs across all major providers, updated daily. Here's the current ranking as of March 2026. Cheapest AI Models: Input Price Ranking Rank Model Provider Input / 1M Output / 1M 1 GPT-4.1 nano OpenAI $0.10 $0.40 2 Mistral Small Mistral $0.10 $0.30 3 Llama 4 Scout Meta $0.15 $0.15 4 GPT-4o mini OpenAI $0.15 $0.60 5 Llama 4 Maverick Meta $0.20 $0.20 6 GPT-5.4 nano OpenAI $0.20 $1.25 7 Grok 4.1 Fast xAI $0.20 $0.50 8 GPT-5.4 mini OpenAI $0.25 $2.00 9 Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Google $0.25 $1.50 10 DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek $0.28 $0.42 Best Value by Use Case Use Case Best Model Monthly Cost (10M tokens) Classification/routing GPT-4.1 nano $5 Chatbots Mistral Small $4 Code generation Grok 4.1 Fast $7 Document analysis Llama 4 Scout $3 Complex reasoning DeepSeek V3.2 $7 Multimodal Gemini 2.5 Flash $28 The Hidden