Basics
What makes an LLM API cheap
An LLM API is cheap when the whole bill for your work is low, and that depends on the model you pick, its output price and your mix of tokens more than on any one headline rate.
Low-cost LLM APIs
Topics
Answer in brief
10 short entries on the questions people ask around low-cost LLM APIs.
Each opens with its answer, then gives the detail and the terms behind it.
All topics
Output
Output price decides most bills
Output tokens cost more than input tokens on nearly every listing, so for work that writes long answers the output price decides whether an LLM API is cheap.
Mix
Your input to output mix
Your mix is the number of input tokens you use for each output token, and it decides which of an API’s two prices you are really paying.
Free tiers
Free tiers and their limits
A free tier saves money only while your use stays inside its limits, and those limits are set low on purpose.
Reading prices
How to read a lowest listed price
A lowest listed price is the lowest rate published for a model on the day it was read, and it says nothing yet about precision, limits or whether it will be there tomorrow.
Model choice
Flash and small models
The cheapest way to call an LLM is usually a smaller model, since a flash variant is priced far below the full model of its family.
Input
Prompt caching and repeat input
Prompt caching bills the repeated opening of a prompt at a lower cached rate, which makes input-heavy work cheaper without changing the model.
Context
Long context on a small budget
Long prompts are billed as input on every request, so on long-context work the input price and the context window decide what is cheap.
Budgeting
What a fixed budget buys
A fixed budget buys a number of tokens that depends on the model and on your mix, so the same money can cover a month of one workload and a day of another.
Total cost
Costs outside the token price
The token price is not the whole cost of an LLM API: retries, rate limits, weak answers that need a second pass and the work of switching providers all add to it.
Questions and answers
Runcrate is our editor’s choice for the cheapest LLM API: 125 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one prepaid balance, and the best developer platform we know. Runcrate publishes this site.
It depends on the model and on your mix. For one model, the price table shows the lowest listed input and output prices on the date they were read, with Runcrate first.
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.
Continue this reading path
Cite this entry
Cheapest LLM API. “Topics.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://cheapestllmapi.dev/topics