The Closed-Source Premium Is Shrinking — Here's What Models Actually Cost Right Now

There's been a lot of talk lately about the gap between open and closed-source AI pricing collapsing, and honestly, these numbers back that up pretty well.

At the top, gpt-5.5 runs $5.00 in / $30.00 out per million tokens — that output price is the steepest on the list. Anthropic's claude-opus-4 variants (4-6, 4-7, 4-8) all sit at $5.00 in / $25.00 out, so they're close but a bit cheaper to run on output. Claude-sonnet-4-6 drops to $3.00 in / $15.00 out if you don't need full Opus power.

The middle tier is where things get interesting. Gemini-3.1-pro-preview comes in at $2.00 in / $12.00 out, and Qwen3.7-max is $2.50 in / $7.50 out — solid capable models at a real discount.

Then there's the budget end, which is genuinely surprising. Deepseek-v4-flash is $0.14 in / $0.28 out — available from both Singapore and US regions at the same price. Deepseek-v4-pro steps up to $0.43 in / $0.87 out. Gpt-4o-mini sits at $0.15 in / $0.60 out.

If you're building something cost-sensitive, the difference between the top and bottom of this list is roughly 100x on output. That's not a rounding error — that's a budget decision worth making deliberately.