// Explainer
The price of intelligence is collapsing
What a million tokens of frontier-model output cost at launch, 2020 to today — and why the collapse, not the capability, is the real story.
Launch-era list prices, $ per million output tokens. Toggle tiers · switch scales · hover points for detail.
So what?
In September 2020, a million tokens of the best available model cost $60. Frontier launch prices have stayed in the same band ever since — GPT-4 at $60, Claude 3 Opus at $75, o1 at $60. The frontier itself is not getting cheaper; it prices as a premium product on the day it ships.
The collapse happens one tier down. Capability that was frontier-priced becomes near-free within roughly eighteen months: GPT-4-class output went from $60 to $15 (GPT-4o) to $0.60 (GPT-4o mini) in under two years, and DeepSeek-V3 shipped frontier-class output at $1.10. Switch the chart to linear scale to feel how violent that drop is — on the log scale it reads as a slope, on linear it reads as a cliff.
The applied takeaway: if a use case almost works economically today, it will work in about a year without you doing anything. Price your product on where the curve is going, not where it is.
// Sources
- https://openai.com/api/pricing/
- https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis
- https://openai.com/pricing
- https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-2
- https://openai.com/blog/new-models-and-developer-products-announced-at-devday
- https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family
- https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
- https://ai.google.dev/pricing
- https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-mini-advancing-cost-efficient-intelligence/
- https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-5-sonnet
- https://www.anthropic.com/pricing
- https://api-docs.deepseek.com/quick_start/pricing
Launch-era list prices per million output tokens; the linked pages may show newer prices today. 2026 models appear once their launch prices are added with sources.