Claude vs GPT API Pricing: Real Cost Per Million Tokens
How Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek pricing compares — and how aiapi.cheap drops every vendor to 70-80% off the same models.
The Question Every Vibe Coder Asks
You opened the Anthropic pricing page. Then OpenAI. Then Gemini. Then you closed all three tabs and went back to building, because the numbers blur together.
This post lays out the shape of vendor pricing without printing dollar amounts that go stale next month. The honest version: when you cut every vendor by 70-80%, the question changes from "which API is cheapest?" to "which model fits the job?". That is the better question anyway.
Real Numbers Per Model Change Often
Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4o, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4.2, and DeepSeek V3.2 all have different list rates per million tokens — and they change. Rather than printing numbers that go stale next month, see /docs for the latest.
What stays consistent: aiapi.cheap charges 70% off (Basic) or 80% off (Pro) the published list rate of each model. So whatever Anthropic / OpenAI / Google charge today, you pay 20-30% of that.
A real example: if Sonnet 4.6 official is around $3 input / $15 output per 1M tokens, Pro plan is roughly $0.60 / $3.00. Same multiplier across all 5 vendors.
A Few Patterns That Hold Across Versions
Those relative positions are stable across the last several model releases. The exact dollar amounts move around, but the ordering and the shape do not.
How One Key Talks To Five Vendors
You get one customer key starting with sk-aic-. You point your existing SDK (Anthropic or OpenAI shape — both work) at https://aiapi.cheap/api/proxy. Switching vendors is a one-line change:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://aiapi.cheap/api/proxy",
api_key="sk-aic-your-key"
)
# Call Claude
client.chat.completions.create(model="claude-sonnet-4-6", messages=[...])
# Same code, call GPT
client.chat.completions.create(model="gpt-4o", messages=[...])
# Same code, call DeepSeek
client.chat.completions.create(model="deepseek-v3.2", messages=[...])No new SDK to learn. No five separate billing accounts to top up. One balance, five vendors.
Why The Comparison Stops Mattering
When everything is 70-80% off, model choice goes back to fit. Some real-talk picks:
What About Prompt Caching?
Claude prompt caching works the same way it does on Anthropic. Cache writes are around 1.25x input rate, cache reads are around 0.1x input rate. Our discount applies on top, which means a cached read on Sonnet 4.6 at Pro lands roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than an uncached call. That floor is what makes production-scale workloads sustainable.
How To Pick Your Plan
Flowchart in 3 lines:
Get Started
Sign up, top up with crypto via Oxapay (USDT, BTC, ETH — no credit card), grab your sk-aic-* key, change one line of code. Read the welcome post for the full overview, the docs for SDK examples, or the Anthropic discount post for more on why this works.