Topic
Token Pricing & Cost Calculation
7 posts on token pricing & cost calculation — part of glossary on the n4n AI blog.
What is a token and how LLM pricing is calculated
A precise technical explanation of LLM tokens, how providers count them, and how pricing translates to real API costs — with code examples and common pitfalls.
Input tokens vs output tokens: why pricing differs
Understand why LLM providers charge differently for input and output tokens, how the asymmetry affects your costs, and strategies to optimize spend across model tiers.
How to estimate monthly LLM API costs before you scale
A step-by-step guide to building accurate LLM API cost models before you scale, with runnable code and validation techniques.
How to calculate the cost of a Claude Opus 4.8 API call
Learn to calculate Claude Opus 4.8 API costs step by step — token counting, pricing formulas, caching discounts, and a runnable cost calculator you can drop into your codebase.
How GPT-5 pricing compares to Claude Opus 4.8
A practical framework for evaluating frontier model pricing when GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.8 launch, based on current OpenAI and Anthropic cost structures.
How DeepSeek's pricing undercuts GPT-5 and Claude
DeepSeek's token pricing model challenges GPT-5 and Claude economics — here's the breakdown engineers need for routing decisions.
Comparing Gemini 3 pricing to GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.8
A practitioner's framework for evaluating frontier LLM pricing — comparing current flagships and what to measure when Gemini 3, GPT-5, and Claude Opus 4.8 arrive.
More topics in glossary
- Structured Outputs & JSON Mode19
- AI Agents Fundamentals12
- Hallucination in LLMs11
- Sampling Parameters: Top-p, Top-k & Penalties11
- Context Window & Context Length10
- Fine-Tuning Fundamentals9
- Foundation Models: Base vs Instruct vs Chat9
- Model Families & Naming Conventions: GPT-5, Claude, Gemini 3, Llama 4, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Grok9
- Grounding & Fact-Checking in AI8
- LLM Benchmarks: MMLU, HumanEval, SWE-bench & GPQA8
- Max Tokens, Stop Sequences & Output Truncation8
- Quantization Formats: GGUF, GPTQ, AWQ & INT4/INT88