Tokens & Pricing
Model tier
The rough class of a model by capability and price. Providers offer a range — small/fast/cheap up to large/slow/expensive — and the price gap between tiers is often 10–30×.
Example
A "flagship" tier model might cost $15 per million output tokens; the same provider's "mini" tier might cost $0.60. If a task (like classifying a support ticket) works fine on the mini tier, running it on the flagship is paying 25× for no benefit.
Related terms
Cost per 1K tokens
The standard way pricing is quoted: dollars per 1,000 tokens, listed separately for input and output. Providers increasingly quote per million tokens, but the per-1K figure is still the mental unit for estimating a call.
Model routing
Automatically sending each request to the cheapest model that can handle it, instead of defaulting everything to one expensive model. The routing decision happens before the call, based on the task.
Output tokens (completion tokens)
The tokens the model generates back to you. Output tokens almost always cost more per token than input tokens — often 3–5× more — because generating text is the expensive part.