Language Model News

2026/10/13

  1. How much does speech-to-text cost per hour? Comparing the xAI and Mistral APIs
  2. Mistral Large 4 costs $1.36 in and $4.18 out, at half price for two weeks after launch
  3. Claude Managed Agents' web_fetch now fetches only URLs that already appear in the session
  4. xAI's speech-to-text API costs $0.10 an hour in batch, and moved to 2.0 on 2 October
  5. Claude Max and Team plans now include monthly API credits ($100 on Max 5x)
  6. GPT-6.1 Sol charges less than GPT-6 Sol for cached input
  7. Claude Sonnet 5.5 keeps Sonnet 5's price, and its cache reads were halved on 7 October
  8. Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced like GPT-6 Luna up to 100K tokens, and five times higher beyond

2026/09/29

  1. Gemini 2.5 models are now limited to users who have used them before
  2. Grok 4.7 joins xAI's model list at the same price and context as Grok 4.6
  3. Gemini 3.8 Live pricing: audio in at $0.005 a minute and audio out at $0.018

2026/09/28

  1. Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS prices double on 1 January 2027
  2. Claude Opus 5.5 is $4 in and $20 out, and the model Anthropic now recommends first
  3. GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna: Luna costs a twentieth of Sol

2026/09/15

  1. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash takes over from V4 Flash at a lower price
  2. Sakana AI's Fugu Ultra v2 and Fugu Max answer by routing work to other models
  3. Cognition's SWE-2 is a coding model built on Kimi K3
  4. Inception's Mercury 2.5, a diffusion model at $0.75 per million output tokens
  5. GPT-Live 1 bills by the minute, at $0.05, with the reasoning model on top

2026/09/08

  1. Meta sells the same model at two prices, and the cheap one is paid for with your prompts
  2. Grok 4.6 is the flagship, and it holds half the context of Grok 4.3
  3. Kimi K3 holds a million tokens at one flat rate
  4. The same Qwen model costs less from Beijing than from Singapore
  5. On Mistral, Large costs a third of Medium
  6. GPT-6 Astra and the three models that make up GPT-6
  7. GPT-6 Astra prices, and the 272K line that reprices the whole request
  8. Claude Fable 5.1 takes the top of the lineup, and Fable 5 moves to legacy
  9. Cache reads on Fable 5.1 are a quarter of what they cost on Fable 5

2026/09/02

  1. The current Claude lineup: 1M context, 128K output, retirement more than a year out
  2. SWE-bench Verified is at 97, and the top of the table is hard to read
  3. A benchmark number means nothing without the conditions it was taken under
  4. Claude API prices, and the Sonnet 5 increase that did not happen
  5. OpenAI API prices: the GPT-5.6 line has long-context rates too
  6. Gemini API prices, and the two dates that change them
  7. DeepSeek now charges double during peak hours
  8. Perplexity Sonar ends on 27 September 2026, replaced by the Agent API
  9. What prompt caching actually costs, and where the tenth does not hold
  10. Long context: who reprices the whole request, and who does not
  11. Adding an MCP server to Claude Code, and which scope to pick

Long context: who reprices the whole request, and who does not

Feeding a model a long document changes the per-token price at some providers and not at others, and this is easy to miss because the model name does not change.

Five providers here have a threshold⁠[1,2,3,4,7]. OpenAI reprices gpt-6-astra above 272,000 input tokens, to $20 input and $75 output against $10 and $50⁠[1]. GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna also double their input and cache rates once a prompt passes 272,000 input tokens⁠[8,9]. xAI reprices every Grok model at 200k, so grok-4.6 goes from $2 and $6 to $4 and $12⁠[2].

Google steps Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview at 200k, from $2 and $12 to $4 and $18⁠[3]. Alibaba steps qwen3.7-plus at 256K, from $0.4 to $1.2 on input and from $1.6 to $4.8 on output⁠[4]. Sakana steps fugu-ultra-v2.0 at 272K, from $5 and $30 to $10 and $45⁠[7].

At OpenAI, xAI and Alibaba, crossing the line by one token raises the price of every token before it as well⁠[1,2,4].

OpenAI writes that the long-context rates apply to the full request, and xAI that a request reaching the threshold is billed at the higher rate for all tokens in it⁠[1,2]. Alibaba writes that all tokens in the request are billed at the unit price of the matching tier⁠[4].

Google and Sakana publish the threshold without saying which way it counts⁠[3,7]. Google labels its rates as prompts up to and over 200k tokens, and Sakana labels one column as context over 272K⁠[3,7]. Neither page says whether the tokens below the line are repriced too⁠[3,7].

Claude 4.6 and later include the full 1 million token context at the standard rate⁠[5]. A 900k token request is billed at the same per-token rate as a 9k one, and caching and batch discounts apply across the whole window⁠[5].

Moonshot publishes no threshold for kimi-k3, so its 1,048,576 tokens run at one rate⁠[6]. Sakana's fugu-max-v1.0 is also priced the same at any context length⁠[7].

Sources

  1. OpenAI - GPT-6 Astra model
  2. xAI - Models
  3. Google - Gemini API pricing
  4. Alibaba Cloud - Model Studio model pricing
  5. Anthropic - Pricing
  6. Kimi - Chat pricing
  7. Sakana AI - Pricing
  8. OpenAI - GPT-6 Sol model
  9. OpenAI - GPT-6 Luna model