Posts tagged with "LLM Cost"

Microsoft-Decision-1 went GA in Microsoft Foundry on 9 October 2026 at $0.042 per million input tokens with free output, returning calibrated probabilities over fixed options instead of text, and it launched with an EU Data Zone at the same price as the US zone. We compare it with OpenAI's Decisions API and H2O-Lightning-4B, run the cost math for ticket routing and agent step-gating, and set out what Swedish buyers must record about its Qwen3.5-9B base.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is GA in Microsoft Foundry at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, the same Global Standard list price as GPT-6 Luna, and 90% below Haiku 4.5 on paper. The bills diverge on three lines: a tier that charges 5x on every token once a prompt passes 100K, a tokenizer that counts the same text as 30% more tokens, and an EU Data Zone that Luna offers at $0.12/$0.60 while Claude on Foundry has none.

Gemini 4 Argon launched on 30 September at an introductory $2/$10 per million tokens, the third frontier model at that price in three days, but unlike Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol it is not in Microsoft Foundry, has no API model ID, and goes to vetted cyber defenders first. The standard price is $4/$20 with no published end date for the discount, so Azure teams in Sweden should budget on the higher figure and prepare a gateway route rather than switch now.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol reached Microsoft Foundry a day apart at the same $2/$10 list price, yet a cache-heavy 60-turn agent session costs $3.45 on Sonnet 5.5 and $2.55 on GPT-6.1 Sol, or $3.06 in the EU Data Zone that Claude still lacks. Above 272K input tokens the order flips, because GPT-6.1 Sol doubles its input rate while Sonnet 5.5 keeps flat pricing to 1M tokens and can run with no up-front reasoning.

Claude Opus 5.5 is GA in Microsoft Foundry at $4/$20 per million tokens with cache reads at $0.20, which cuts a cache-heavy 60-turn agent session from $8.63 on Opus 5 to $5.10 and brings it within 1.5x of Sonnet 5. The saving can reverse on uncached endpoints that ran Opus 5 with thinking disabled, because thinking is now always on, the default effort dropped to medium, and Foundry still offers no EU data zone, batch pricing or fast mode.

GPT-6 Astra arrived in Microsoft Foundry on 3 September 2026 at $10/$50 per million tokens, the same list price as Claude Fable 5.1 and 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol on promo, behind a Limited Access gate and with no EU Data Zone. The cost math on document jobs and 60-turn agent loops, the 272K long-context cliff, what the Critical cyber rating means for refusals, and how a Swedish team should handle residency until the EU zone lands at its new 20% premium.

Claude Fable 5.1 keeps Fable 5's $10/$50 pricing but cuts cache reads to $0.25 per million tokens, which turns a 60-turn agent session from $17.25 into $10.50 and shrinks the premium over Opus 5 from 2x to about 22%. On Microsoft Foundry it ships Anthropic-hosted only, with no EU data zone, no Batches API, a zero default quota on pay-as-you-go, mandatory 30-day retention until Enterprise Frontier Safeguards arrive, and three breaking changes for teams migrating from Fable 5.

Agent loops cost 10x to 50x what a chatbot interaction costs; multi-agent systems add another order of magnitude. The cost compounding is structural, not a bug. The cost reduction is structural too. Decomposing where the tokens go and how to bring agent economics back from runaway to acceptable.

A technical guide to prompt caching across Claude, Azure OpenAI, and GPT — what belongs in the cache, how to structure cache breakpoints, TTL realities, hit-rate optimization, and the anti-patterns that erase the savings.