LLM API Pricing in 2026: Inside the Frontier Model Price War

DeepSeek made a 75% discount permanent, Opus 4.8 held prices flat, and GPT-5.5 surfaced — all in one week. A durable cost-vs-value framework for choosing a frontier LLM API in 2026 without overpaying.

05/28/2026 · Model Evaluation · 8 min read