UNIT · ai-tools · standard · freshness 30d
Cheapest LLM API for High-Volume Agent Traffic in 2026
Cost comparison across Gemini Flash, Claude Haiku, GPT-5 Nano, DeepSeek, and Groq-hosted open models — including caching, batch discounts, and where quality holds at scale.
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For agents running thousands of small calls per minute, headline price-per-token only tells half the story. Caching, batch APIs, and per-call latency change the real per-task cost meaningfully.
Headline prices (input / output, USD per Mtok)
| Model | Input | Output | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3 Flash | $0.10 | $0.40 | Fast, cheap, 1M-token context |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | Strongest small model on agentic tasks |
| GPT-5 Nano | $0.20 | $0.80 | Frontier-tier with smaller capacity |
| DeepSeek-V3.5 | $0.14 | $0.28 | Open-weights API, generous off-peak discount |
| Llama 3.3 70B (Groq) | $0.59 | $0.79 | ~500 tok/s, lowest latency in this list |
| Mistral Small 3.1 | $0.20 | $0.60 | Strong EU-hosted option |
Cost-cutting techniques
Prompt caching
Anthropic and OpenAI offer ~90% discount on cached input tokens…
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