Cheapest first
Frontier LLM pricing compared
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI's top-tier models, ranked by live monthly cost at the same workload.
Most comparison pages on this site pick two providers at a time, but the question buyers actually ask before committing to a frontier-tier model is broader: of the major labs' top-tier offerings, which is cheapest at a given workload? This page rounds up the frontier tier from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI in one ranked table.
Frontier tiers are priced for maximum capability, not maximum cost efficiency — teams reach for them for the hardest tasks in a workload, not bulk traffic. The 20M input / 4M output token workload here is the same moderate-production baseline used elsewhere on this site, so this ranking is directly comparable to the balanced- and budget-tier rankings on the other pages.
Frontier-tier price gaps between labs tend to be smaller than budget-tier gaps, since all four are competing on being the best available option rather than the cheapest — but the gap is rarely zero, and it is the number most worth checking before defaulting to whichever frontier model your team already has API access to.
Live pricing snapshot
Workload: 20M input tokens, 4M output tokens per month · Last verified Jul 14, 2026| Rank | Quality index (AA) | Unit price | Blended $/1M | vs cheapest | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | xAI | Grok 4.5 Cheapestsource | frontier | 57 | In $2.00 / Out $6.00 per 1M tokens | $2.67/1M | $64 | — |
| 02 | Gemini 3 Prosource | frontier | 60 | In $2.00 / Out $12.00 per 1M tokens | $3.67/1M | $88 | 1.4× (+$24) | |
| 03 | Anthropic | Claude Opus 4.8source | frontier | 62 | In $5.00 / Out $25.00 per 1M tokens | $8.33/1M | $200 | 3.1× (+$136) |
| 04 | OpenAI | GPT-5.6 Solsource | frontier | 59 | In $5.00 / Out $30.00 per 1M tokens | $9.17/1M | $220 | 3.4× (+$156) |
Prices are read live from the AICostCompass catalogue at page load, not hardcoded on this page, and reflect the workload above. Adjust the workload in the Compare tool to price your own usage instead.
Quality index (AA) is the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a single normalized score every candidate on this page has, so it is directly comparable across rows unlike a mix of provider-specific benchmarks.
Frontier tier is a capability decision first
The cost gap across frontier tiers is real but typically narrower than at budget tiers — check the live ranking above for today's order. Given how close frontier pricing tends to run, task-specific capability (coding, long-context reasoning, multimodal input) is usually a stronger deciding factor than the monthly-cost difference alone.
Rate limits, SLA & data residency
Cheapest-per-token is moot if you're throttled. Cost table above, capacity/policy context below.
OpenAI
Rate limits: Five spend-based usage tiers (Tier 1 at $5 spent up to Tier 5 at $1,000+ cumulative spend and 30+ days), enforced on requests and tokens per minute and per day. A new account starts at Tier 1 with meaningfully lower limits than an established Tier 5 or enterprise account.
SLA: No published uptime SLA on standard pay-as-you-go API access. Enterprise / high-commitment customers can negotiate priority processing and an SLA via sales.
Data residency: Official data residency program for at-rest processing/storage in specific regions (EU, UK, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, India, UAE), plus a Zero Data Retention option — both sales-gated for eligible enterprise customers.
Source · checked 2026-07-18Anthropic
Rate limits: Organization-level usage tiers (Start, Build, Scale, plus custom enterprise), tied to spend, with separate request- and token-per-minute ceilings. Self-service increase requests unlock once you hit roughly 50% of your current limit.
SLA: No uptime guarantee on the default Standard tier. A Priority Tier product targeted 99.5% uptime for committed-capacity contracts, though Anthropic's docs currently note it's no longer available for new purchases (existing contracts continue through term).
Data residency: Zero Data Retention available for eligible orgs. The direct API only supports "us" or "global" inference routing today — dedicated EU-only residency requires routing through AWS Bedrock or Google Vertex AI's EU endpoints instead.
Source · checked 2026-07-18Google (Gemini)
Rate limits: Project-based usage tiers (Free, Tier 1 once billing is linked, Tier 2 above $250 spend, Tier 3 above $1,000 spend, each after a 30-day wait), enforced simultaneously on requests/tokens per minute and requests per day.
SLA: A formal SLA exists for the Gemini API on Vertex AI, but a guarantee on processed-request availability requires Provisioned Throughput (a paid reserved-capacity product) — standard pay-as-you-go has a narrower model-availability SLA.
Data residency: Jurisdictional/regional endpoints keep processing within a chosen region (e.g. US or EU); eligible enterprise customers can get zero-data-retention-equivalent contract terms via a DPA amendment that disables caching and abuse-monitoring logging.
Source · checked 2026-07-18xAI
Rate limits: Team-level tiers set by cumulative API spend (tracked since Jan 1, 2026), with per-model request- and token-per-minute limits that unlock automatically as spend grows and don't downgrade.
SLA: Not verified: xAI references an enterprise uptime commitment, but a specific percentage could not be confirmed on an xAI-owned page as of the last check — confirm directly with xAI before relying on a number.
Data residency: Standard API data is retained roughly 30 days for abuse auditing then deleted, with no training on API inputs/outputs by default. An Enterprise Vault option adds dedicated infrastructure, customer-managed keys, and tenant isolation.
Source · checked 2026-07-18Methodology
Each candidate's current per-1M-token input/output rate is applied to a 20M input / 4M output token monthly workload, read live from the catalogue, restricted to each provider's frontier quality tier and ranked by resulting monthly cost.
Frequently asked questions
Which frontier model is cheapest right now?
See the live ranked table above — frontier pricing across labs changes as each repriced, so this page always reflects the current catalogue rather than a fixed ranking.
Why compare frontier tiers instead of each lab's cheapest model?
Frontier tiers answer a different question: "if I need the best available option from each provider, what does that cost?" For lowest absolute price, see the cheapest-LLM-API pages elsewhere on this site instead.
Is the cheapest frontier model also the best one?
Not necessarily — this ranks cost only. Frontier models differentiate primarily on capability (coding, reasoning, context length, multimodal support), which this ranking does not measure; validate against your actual task before choosing on price alone.