How the numbers are made
Checked 2026-11-07
01A job, not a list price
Every comparison starts from a concrete job: “one 8-second 720p clip with audio”, “one 1K image”, “a chat workload at 3 input tokens per output token”. For each route we first check it can do the job, then apply the matching price rule, convert credits to dollars, and add fees you must pay.
02The price ledger
Separately from the curated comparisons, a collector reads every public price on all six platforms on a schedule set per platform, daily by default: OpenRouter, kie.ai and fal through their pricing APIs, WaveSpeed through its model API, Replicate’s official-model pages, and APIMart’s pricing and model pages. Every response is kept byte for byte with its SHA-256, and each model page links to the responses its prices came from. A price is never overwritten: when it changes, the old version is closed with the time it stopped applying.
03Change alerts
Each run is compared with the last. New prices, price moves, unit changes and disappearances are logged. A move of 30% or more either way, a unit change, or a price that disappears is flagged. A run that comes back with less than half the prices we hold is treated as suspect and removes nothing; neither does a run where any page failed.
04What the ledger can’t see
fal’s model list omits deprecated and retiring endpoints, so those are missing. WaveSpeed’s list gives one base price per model without a unit; we show it as a “from” price and never rank it. Replicate is limited to its official-model collection. Platforms’ own “official price” and “fal price” figures are shown as their claims, not as fact.
05Exact, approximate, not comparable
Exact: the route does exactly what you asked. Approximate: it can do the job with a difference we spell out, such as “only makes 8-second clips”; it is priced at what it actually produces and listed separately. Not comparable: the platform only publishes a “from” price, or no price for that combination. Those rows are shown but never ranked.
06Estimates
Some image models are settled by tokens. Where the platform gives a per-image figure we show it with ≈ and say so.
07Discounts and fees
List price is what a new, ordinary account pays, including promo prices shown publicly. “Best public tier” uses the best published membership price or top-up bonus, and says when upgrade rules are not public. OpenRouter’s 5.5% top-up fee is included in landed cost.
08Reference price
Official when the model’s maker publishes an API price. Market when several official partner platforms list the same price. We do not use platforms’ own “official price” labels; some were not official.
09Routes
Official: the maker’s own endpoint. Official partner: a hosted endpoint run with the maker. Third-party: a route the platform itself labels as non-official. Not disclosed: the platform does not say.
10What we do not measure yet
Success rate, speed and output quality. Testing with paid generations is the next step. Until then, the ranking is price only, and a cheap route may be unreliable.
11Independence
No partnerships with any platform, no paid placement, no referral links. Prices were checked by hand on 2026-11-07 against each platform’s public pages.