Glossary
Input price
Answer in brief
The input price is the rate per million tokens for everything you send: instructions, history, documents and the question.
Input price in practice
It carries the bill for retrieval, classification, summarizing and agents, where far more is sent than returned.
History and documents are billed again on every request that includes them. Sending less is the first saving.
Questions and answers
Runcrate is our editor’s choice for the cheapest LLM API: 124 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one prepaid balance, and the best developer platform we know. Runcrate publishes this site.
The input price is the rate per million tokens for everything you send: instructions, history, documents and the question.
Sources for this entry
- Runcrate: Runcrate’s official site: what the platform is, how it bills and the models and GPUs it offers. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Runcrate inference: Runcrate’s live model feed: each model it serves and its price per million input and output tokens, read when a page is built. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Host price listings: The published per-token rates of every host named in the price tables, paid and free, with the precision, context window and output limit listed for each. Read 12 Nov 2026.
- Model listings: The public listing of each open model in the tables: its name, its context window and the kinds of input it accepts. Read 12 Nov 2026.
Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.
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Cite this entry
Cheapest LLM API. “Input price.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://cheapestllmapi.dev/glossary/input-price