Compare All LLM API Providers Software 2026
Side-by-side comparison of 25 llm api providers tools. Find the right fit for your team and budget.
LLM API Providers software pricing ranges from Free to $270 per user per month in 2026. The category average is $11/user/month. 10 of 25 tools offer free tiers.
Quick Picks
Full Comparison Matrix
| Product | Starting Price | Popular Tier | Enterprise | Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groq | Free /per million tokens | Free /per million tokens | Free /per million tokens | Yes | Prototyping and evaluation |
| OctoAI | Custom | Custom | Custom | No | Historical reference only — service is not available |
| Cloudflare Workers AI | $0.05 /per million tokens | $0.50 /per million tokens | $5 /per million tokens | Yes | Prototyping + low-volume production at the edge |
| Lepton AI | $0.07 /per million tokens | $0.50 /per million tokens | $4 /per million tokens | No | Developers needing fast serverless inference for open-source models |
| Mistral AI API | $0.10 /per million tokens | $0.50 /per million tokens | $6 /per million tokens | Yes | Evaluation and prototyping |
| Cohere API | $0.04 /per million tokens | $0.60 /per million tokens | $10 /per million tokens | Yes | Evaluation and prototyping |
| SambaNova Cloud | $0.10 /per million tokens | $0.90 /per million tokens | $5 /per million tokens | Yes | Testing ultra-low-latency inference |
| Anyscale | $0.15 /per million tokens | $1 /per million tokens | $5 /per million tokens | No | Teams needing scalable open-source LLM inference with Ray reliability |
| Baidu ERNIE API | $0.10 /per million tokens | $1 /per million tokens | $10 /per million tokens | No | China-market apps and Chinese-first workloads |
| Cerebras Inference API | $0.10 /per million tokens | $1 /per million tokens | $6 /per million tokens | Yes | Testing Cerebras's unique speed advantage |
| MiniMax API | $0.20 /per million tokens | $1 /per million tokens | $3 /per million tokens | No | Long-context (1M tokens) and Chinese-language apps |
| Qwen API (Alibaba) | $0.05 /per million tokens | $1 /per million tokens | $20 /per million tokens | No | Multilingual apps (strong Chinese), cost-sensitive deployments, vision tasks |
| NVIDIA NIM | $0.10 /per million tokens | $1.50 /per million tokens | $10 /per million tokens | Yes | Prototyping and evaluation |
| Moonshot Kimi API | $0.15 /per million tokens | $2 /per million tokens | $10 /per million tokens | No | Long-context Chinese/English applications and agentic workloads |
| OpenRouter | Free /per million tokens | $2 /per million tokens | $75 /per million tokens | Yes | Experimentation and development with free open-source models |
| Amazon Bedrock | $0.07 /per million tokens | $3 /per million tokens | $75 /per million tokens | No | AWS-native deployments needing multi-model routing |
| Perplexity API | $1 /per million tokens + per-request fee | $3 /per million tokens + per-request fee | $15 /per million tokens + per-request fee | No | Cost-efficient web-grounded queries |
| xAI Grok API | $0.20 /per million tokens | $3 /per million tokens | $30 /per million tokens | No | Developers integrating Grok into their applications |
| Together AI | $0.03 /per million tokens / hour | $4.99 /per million tokens / hour | $9.95 /per million tokens / hour | No | Variable-volume API usage |
| Fireworks AI | Free /per million tokens / hour | $5.50 /per million tokens / hour | $11 /per million tokens / hour | No | Variable-volume API usage |
| Google Gemini API | Free /per million tokens | $9 /per million tokens | $18 /per million tokens | Yes | Prototyping and evaluation |
| Vercel AI SDK | Free /per month (Vercel plan) | $20 /per month (Vercel plan) | $20 /per month (Vercel plan) | Yes | Individual developers using Vercel AI SDK for personal projects |
| Claude API | $0.03 /per million tokens | $37.52 /per million tokens | $75 /per million tokens | No | Developers building AI-powered applications on Claude |
| DeepInfra | $0.00 /per million tokens | $41.25 /per million tokens | $82.50 /per million tokens | No | Developers needing affordable inference for open-source and commercial models in production |
| OpenAI API | $0.20 /per million tokens | $135.10 /per million tokens | $270 /per million tokens | No | High-volume, cost-sensitive API workloads |
Category Summary
25
Products
Free
Avg Starting
$11
Avg Popular
10
Free Tiers
LLM API Providers Pricing FAQ
01 What are LLM API providers?
LLM API providers offer access to large language models via API, enabling developers to add AI capabilities to applications without hosting models themselves. They charge per token (input and output) and compete on price, speed, model selection, and features like web search grounding or RAG optimization.
02 How much do LLM APIs cost in 2026?
LLM API pricing is per-token and varies widely by model size and provider. Small models (under 8B parameters) cost $0.02-0.20 per million tokens on Groq, Together AI, and Mistral. Mid-range models cost $0.30-1.25 per million tokens (Gemini Flash, Mistral Medium). Frontier models (GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro) cost $1-5 per million input tokens. Perplexity Sonar adds per-request fees on top of token costs.
03 Which LLM API provider is cheapest?
For small open-source models, Groq (from $0.05/M tokens) and Mistral Nemo ($0.02/M) are the cheapest. For frontier-quality models, Mistral Large 3 at $0.50/$1.50 per million tokens is dramatically cheaper than GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet. Google Gemini Flash-Lite at $0.10/$0.40 per million tokens offers frontier quality at budget prices. Cohere Command R7B is cheapest for RAG at $0.037/M input tokens.
04 Which LLM API provider has the best free tier?
Google Gemini API offers the best free tier: 1,500 requests/day on Flash models through Google AI Studio with no credit card required. Groq offers a free API key with rate-limited access to all models. Mistral offers a free trial tier via La Plateforme. Cohere offers a free Trial API key for non-commercial use. Together AI and Fireworks AI offer $1 in free credits. Perplexity API has no free tier.
05 What is the difference between per-token and per-request LLM API pricing?
Most LLM APIs charge per token (input tokens + output tokens × rate). Perplexity API is unique in adding a per-request fee on top of token costs — every Sonar query incurs a $5-14 per 1,000 requests charge based on search context depth. This dual model reflects the cost of real-time web search bundled into each query. When comparing Perplexity to other APIs, you must add both token costs and request fees to get the true cost per query.