LLM pricing

Alibaba (Qwen)

The Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen) model family from Alibaba Cloud's Tongyi Lab. First released in 2023, Qwen is the most-downloaded open-weight model family in the world — most tiers ship under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face and ModelScope, while the proprietary Max tier is served through Alibaba Cloud's Model Studio.

OpenAI

The lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT family. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others; restructured into a capped-profit LLC in 2019 and finally into a public-benefit corporation on October 28, 2025. Ships the largest commercial model lineup, the largest consumer AI product, and — after the April 2026 funding round — the highest-valued private AI company in history at ~$852B.

Zhipu (Z.ai / GLM)

The Beijing lab behind the GLM models, also operating internationally as Z.ai. Spun out of Tsinghua University in 2019, Zhipu ships strong coding/agentic models, multiple free tiers, and open weights — and was the first of China's "Six Tigers" to pursue an IPO. It also sits on the US Entity List.

Anthropic

The AI safety-focused lab behind Claude. Founded by ex-OpenAI researchers in 2021, it ships frontier-grade reasoning models through an API that does not retain prompts by default, and publishes a Responsible Scaling Policy, now in version 3.0.

Baichuan

The Beijing lab behind the Baichuan general models and the medical M-series. Founded in 2023 by Wang Xiaochuan (former CEO of search engine Sogou), Baichuan has pivoted hard toward healthcare AI — its open-source Baichuan-M3 tops several medical benchmarks — while keeping a general-purpose 4-series lineup.

ByteDance (Doubao)

The Doubao model family from ByteDance — parent of TikTok and Douyin. Served through the Volcano Ark (火山方舟) platform on ByteDance's Volcano Engine cloud, Doubao powers China's most-used consumer AI app and undercuts most frontier labs on price.

Tencent (Hunyuan)

The Hunyuan (混元) model family from Tencent — parent of WeChat, QQ, and the world's largest games business. Served through Tencent Cloud and the Yuanbao assistant inside WeChat, Hunyuan reaches over a billion users through China's dominant super-app.

MiniMax

The Shanghai lab behind the agentic MiniMax M2 models and the Hailuo video/audio generators. Founded in 2021 by Yan Junjie (a former SenseTime research lead), MiniMax pairs cheap long-context text models with consumer media apps — and listed in Hong Kong in January 2026.

SpaceXAI

Elon Musk's AI lab, founded March 2023 as X.AI Corp. Ships the Grok family — frontier reasoning and coding models trained on the Memphis Colossus supercluster — 200,000 H100s in one interconnected cluster, 150 MW at peak, with a stated roadmap to 1M GPUs. Acquired by SpaceX on Feb 2, 2026 at a $250B valuation ($1.25T combined entity). Renamed from xAI to SpaceXAI in July 2026, when the lab folded fully into SpaceX. The Grok brand is unchanged, the API still lives at docs.x.ai, and Grok stays integrated natively into X (Twitter).

Mistral AI

The Paris lab behind Le Chat and the open-weight Mistral family. Founded in 2023 by Arthur Mensch with ex-DeepMind and Meta researchers, it ships frontier-grade models with Apache-2.0 open weights for most tiers and EU-native data residency — the leading European alternative to US labs.

Cohere

Cohere is an enterprise AI company behind Command, Aya, Embed, Rerank, and North. Public token pricing is currently explicit for Aya Expanse; newer Command models are listed as live but use custom or private-deployment pricing.

Google

Google DeepMind is the AI division of Alphabet, formed in April 2023 by merging the original DeepMind (founded London, 2010, acquired by Google in 2014) with Google Brain. CEO Demis Hassabis. Ships the Gemini family — the most multimodal frontier lineup on the market (text + image + audio + video native) — through both the Gemini API and the cloud platform now rebranded as Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI, renamed April 2026).

Inception (Mercury)

Inception builds diffusion LLMs — models that generate tokens in parallel rather than one after another. The Mercury family is the only architecture of its kind priced in this catalogue, and the company sells it on throughput: over 1,000 tokens per second, or as its own marketing puts it, frontier quality at five times the speed.

Moonshot (Kimi)

The lab behind Kimi — the long-context assistant — and the open-weight Kimi K2 models. Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin with Tsinghua schoolmates, Moonshot ships a 1-trillion-parameter open-weight MoE that rivals frontier US labs while staying downloadable on Hugging Face.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA builds the Nemotron open model family and serves it through NIM inference microservices. It is the one major lab on this site that does not sell its models by the token — you evaluate free, self-host under a licence, or buy from a partner. That makes "the price of Nemotron" a different question from the one this site usually answers.

Reka

Reka is an AI lab offering Chat, Research, and Vision APIs. For AI//COST we track the public text-token rows for Reka Edge, Reka Flash, and Reka Core.

Sakana AI

Sakana AI describes Sakana Fugu as a multi-agent system delivered as one model API. Fugu dynamically orchestrates a pool of expert models for coding, reasoning, research, security analysis, and other complex multi-step work. Since September 11, 2026 it comes in two fixed-price tiers: Fugu Ultra for the highest capability and Fugu Max for the lowest cost.

AI21 Labs

Jamba is the model family from AI21 Labs, an Israeli AI lab founded in 2017. Jamba pairs a Mamba state-space architecture with Transformer layers for a 256K-token context at a lower cost than comparable long-context models, and ships as Jamba Large and Jamba Mini.

Baidu

ERNIE (Wenxin) is the large-language-model family built by Baidu, China's largest search company, and served through its Qianfan MaaS platform. The lineup runs from the ERNIE 5.x frontier tier down to the cost-efficient ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, all priced per token in Chinese yuan.

DeepSeek

The Chinese lab behind the DeepSeek open-weight models. Spun out of quant hedge fund High-Flyer in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, it shocked the industry by matching frontier reasoning quality at a fraction of the cost — and shipping the weights under an MIT license.

Upstage

The South Korean lab behind the Solar models, founded in October 2020 by Sung Kim — a former HKUST professor who led Naver's Clova team. Upstage pairs a compact, cost-efficient LLM line with a strong document-AI business, and in 2026 became Korea's first generative-AI unicorn.

Amazon

Amazon Nova is the family of first-party foundation models built by Amazon and served on Amazon Bedrock. The current Nova 2 generation replaced the original Nova Micro/Lite/Pro/Premier lineup, led by Nova 2 Lite at a 1M-token context window with on-demand per-token pricing.

Perplexity