September 2026
State of AI Cost, September 2026
Published September 1, 2026. Covers Sep 1 to Sep 20, 2026.
The Frontier index sits at $4.64 per million tokens, unchanged. The lowest blended price on record is nscale/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct at $0.015 per million tokens. 10 models changed price. The community tracked $106.66 of AI spend across 4 contributors.
Key takeaways
Frontier AI held flat this period, at $4.64 per 1M tokens (blended).
Biggest move: gemini/gemini-flash-lite-latest output price rose 525%.
Cheapest credible model: nscale/Qwen/Qwen2.5-Coder-3B-Instruct per 1M tokens (blended).
contributed real usage to this report's community numbers.
The AI Cost Index
See the live AI Cost Index for the current value and full history.
Biggest price moves
| Model | Output before | Output after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemini/gemini-flash-lite-latest | $0.40 | $2.50 | +525% |
| gemini-flash-lite-latest | $0.40 | $2.50 | +525% |
| eu.anthropic.claude-3-5-haiku-20241022-v1:0 | $1.25 | $4.00 | +220% |
| azure_ai/Llama-4-Maverick-17B-128E-Instruct-FP8 | $0.35 | $1.00 | +185.7% |
| azure_ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 | $0.51 | $1.32 | +158.8% |
| fireworks_ai/deepseek-v4-flash-0731 | $0.28 | $0.66 | +135.7% |
| openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813 | $1.73 | $3.96 | +128.3% |
| azure/gpt-image-2 | $10.00 | $0.00 | -100% |
| azure/gpt-image-2-2026-04-21 | $10.00 | $0.00 | -100% |
| gpt-image-2 | $10.00 | $0.00 | -100% |
Lowest cost per million tokens
What the community spent
Top models by spend
Anonymized aggregate across opted-in contributors. See the live community dashboard.
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Free to use and cite under CC BY 4.0. See how this is measured.
Champlin Enterprises. (2026). State of AI Cost, September 2026 [Report]. MyTokenTracker. Retrieved September 20, 2026, from https://mytokentracker.io/reports/state-of-ai-cost-2026-09
@misc{mtt-report-state-of-ai-cost-2026-09,
title = {State of AI Cost, September 2026},
author = {{Champlin Enterprises}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {MyTokenTracker, \url{https://mytokentracker.io/reports/state-of-ai-cost-2026-09}},
note = {Accessed September 20, 2026. Licensed CC BY 4.0.},
url = {https://mytokentracker.io/reports/state-of-ai-cost-2026-09}
}
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