The price sheet lies

List price tells you almost nothing about what AI really costs.

Name: AI list price vs actual cost to run
Creator: MyTokenTracker
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Kimi K2.6 is listed 50% cheaper than Nova 2.0 Pro Preview (medium). It costs 106% more to actually run.

See the chart Why it happens

The flip

Same models, two orderings

Each model ranked by list price on the left, and by what it actually costs to run Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index on the right. Follow a line across — where it climbs, the sticker price lied.

Cheaper on paper, pricier to run Looks pricey, secretly a bargain Every other measured model

13 models with both a list price and a measured run cost · updated 1 hour ago

Why the sticker lies

You don't buy tokens. You buy answers.

A price sheet quotes dollars per million tokens. But a task isn't a fixed number of tokens — and that's where the bill hides.

①

List price is per token

The number on the pricing page is $ per million input/output tokens. It says nothing about how many tokens a model will spend to finish your task.

②

Reasoning models are verbose

A "thinking" model can emit 10–50× more tokens chewing through the same problem. Cheap per token × a mountain of tokens = an expensive answer.

③

The real unit is the task

Run the same fixed benchmark across models and the cheap-looking ones often cost the most. Rank by the finished job, not the sticker.

Receipts

Where list price misleads the most

Sorted by how far a model moves when you re-rank by real cost. ▲ means it's pricier than its sticker suggests; ▼ means it's a quiet bargain.

Model	List $/Mtok	Actual run cost	Re-rank
Nova 2.0 Pro Preview (medium) Amazon	$3.44	$407	▼ 6 cheaper
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google	$0.56	$95	▼ 3 cheaper
Kimi K2.6 Kimi	$1.71	$839	▲ 2 pricier
MiniMax-M3 MiniMax	$0.53	$235	▲ 2 pricier
Qwen3.5 122B A10B (Reasoning) Alibaba	$1.10	$447	▲ 2 pricier
MiniMax-M2.7 MiniMax	$0.53	$144	▲ 2 pricier
Qwen3.5 397B A17B (Reasoning) Alibaba	$1.35	$528	▲ 1 pricier
Gemini 3.5 Flash (high) Google	$3.38	$1,142	▲ 1 pricier
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi	$0.54	$99	▼ 1 cheaper
Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B (Reasoning) NVIDIA	$1.18	$444	— even

List price is the blended 3:1 input:output rate. "Actual run cost" is what it costs to run the full Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, from Artificial Analysis — a fixed task suite, so the only variable is how each model behaves.

Citation

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APA

Champlin Enterprises. (2026). The AI Price Sheet Lies (MyTokenTracker) [Data set]. MyTokenTracker. Retrieved June 20, 2026, from https://mytokentracker.io/price-vs-cost

BibTeX

@misc{mytokentracker-price-vs-cost,
  title        = {The AI Price Sheet Lies (MyTokenTracker)},
  author       = {{Champlin Enterprises}},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {MyTokenTracker, \url{https://mytokentracker.io/price-vs-cost}},
  note         = {Accessed June 20, 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0.},
  url          = {https://mytokentracker.io/price-vs-cost}
}

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