Posts tagged with "LLM Pricing"

DeepSeek's V4-Pro reached general availability on 13 August 2026 with a 1M-token context and strong agent benchmarks, and three days later its peak-hour output price rose from a flat $0.87 to $3.96 per million tokens. For EU teams that built agent cost models around ultra-cheap open-weight APIs, the arithmetic, the data governance questions and the Azure hosting options all deserve a fresh look.

Google shipped gemini-3.7-flash as generally available on 13 August 2026 at an introductory $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens, two weeks after OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 percent and days after Anthropic locked Claude Sonnet 5 at $2/$10 permanently. We compare the three workhorse models on list price, context, Azure availability and EU residency, and show why cost per completed task beats cost per token.

Anthropic has cancelled the Claude Sonnet 5 price increase scheduled for 1 September 2026, making the introductory $2 input / $10 output per million tokens the permanent standard price. For teams running Claude on Azure through Microsoft Foundry, that removes a planned 50% jump from autumn budgets and reshapes the mid-tier price comparison against GPT-5.6 Terra and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

Claude Opus 5 launched on 24 July 2026 at $5/$25 per million tokens with a 1M context window and day-one availability in Microsoft Foundry. For long-running agents the per-token price is the wrong unit: we work through cost per completed task against Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and flag the EU data-residency caveat Swedish Azure teams need to check first.

Google's 21 July release of Gemini 3.6 Flash pairs an output-price cut from $9.00 to $7.50 per million tokens with a claim of roughly 17% fewer output tokens per task, compounding to about 31% lower output cost for unchanged work. That combination makes per-million-token price sheets unreliable for model comparison, and Azure teams should measure cost per completed task instead.

GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) went GA in Microsoft Foundry on 9 July 2026, day-and-date with OpenAI, alongside a new Asia-Pacific Data Zone and a hosted agents runtime with VNet integration. A practical guide for Swedish and EU Azure teams: choosing between the three models, picking Global Standard versus EU Data Zone versus PTUs, worked cost math on the launch prices, and a two-week adoption checklist.

Claude Opus 4.8 arrives at unchanged pricing with an effort control on all plans, a fast mode at a third of the previous fast-inference cost, and a Messages API change that lets system entries sit inside the messages array so mid-task instruction updates no longer invalidate the prompt cache. Worked token math shows cache hit rate remains the biggest cost lever, and a four-question framework matches effort, speed and fan-out to each workload.