I shipped a 9 M-token/month RAG pipeline in late 2025, and within two billing cycles my Claude Opus 4.7 invoice had crossed $1,200. That is when I started treating the cost-per-million-tokens column as a first-class product feature and rerouted every frontier model through the Sign up here for HolySheep AI relay. This guide distills six weeks of head-to-head testing into a no-nonsense 2026 price comparison between DeepSeek V4, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Flash — every figure benchmarked against the same OpenAI-compatible base URL.
2026 Output Pricing — Verified Snapshot
All list prices below were captured from each vendor's pricing page in January 2026 and re-verified via the HolySheep relay's x-holysheep-quote response header. Output tokens are the dominant cost driver for chat and agent workloads, so the table focuses there; input tokens are billed at roughly 4x–30x lower per model.
| Model | Vendor | Input $/MTok | Output $/MTok | Context Window |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V3.2 | DeepSeek | $0.07 | $0.42 | 128 K |
| DeepSeek V4 (preview) | DeepSeek | $0.12 | $0.68 | 256 K |
| GPT-4.1 | OpenAI | $2.50 | $8.00 | 1 M |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | 200 K |
| Claude Opus 4.7 | Anthropic | $15.00 | $75.00 | 500 K |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.15 | $2.50 | 1 M |
DeepSeek had not finalized GA pricing for V4 at the time of writing, so the $0.68/MTok output figure reflects the early-access tier quoted through the HolySheep relay. Treat it as directional — within 5–10% of the eventual list price, in our estimation.
10M Output Tokens / Month — Concrete Bill Comparison
Anchoring the math on a real workload removes all the hand-waving. Imagine a mid-sized SaaS generating 10 million output tokens per month — roughly 2,500 long-form completions at 4 K tokens each, or about 80,000 customer chat replies. At pure list price, ignoring input tokens:
- Claude Opus 4.7: 10 × $75.00 = $750.00 / month
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 10 × $15.00 = $150.00 / month
- GPT-4.1: 10 × $8.00 = $80.00 / month
- Gemini 2.5 Flash: 10 × $2.50 = $25.00 /