Cheapest AI API: Provider Comparison 2026

AI API pricing depends on three factors: the model (size, quality), infrastructure (data centers vs. decentralized network), and the provider's business model (margin, subscriptions, free tiers).

Centralized providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — maintain high prices. Their models (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.1 Pro) operate in their own data centers with huge operational expenses: rent, electricity, cooling, staff. The price per 1M tokens varies from $0.75 (Gemini 3.7 Flash) to $30 (GPT-5.5 output). These costs are passed on to users.

Open-source hosting providers — Together AI, Groq, Fireworks — offer open models (DeepSeek, Llama, Qwen) cheaper because they do not pay for model development. Typical price: $0.20 – $2.00/1M tokens. This is significantly cheaper, but still a centralized infrastructure with high overhead costs.

Decentralized networks — Gonka, Akash, io.net — operate fundamentally differently. Computing power is provided by independent hosts (miners) who receive tokens for their work. No data centers, no corporate expenses. The Gonka network uses Proof of Useful Work — every computation simultaneously processes a real AI request and secures the blockchain. The result: $0.0062/1M tokens — hundreds of times cheaper than OpenAI.

For developers and companies, this means a fundamentally different economy. A project that spent $10,000/month on OpenAI API gets the same volume of inference for a few dollars. Automation, chatbots, RAG pipelines, AI assistants — all of this becomes accessible even for small teams without an AI budget.

Below is the current price table for November 2026. We have included all major AI API providers: from the largest (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) to open-source hosters (Together AI, Groq) and decentralized solutions (JoinGonka Gateway). Prices are per 1M tokens.

The same models, different price. MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash are exactly the same models provided by JoinGonka. Through OpenRouter, the same MiniMax M2.7 costs $0.21/1M for input — tens of times more expensive than JoinGonka's input price ($0.0062/1M). The difference is not in the model, but in the infrastructure: OpenRouter buys inference from commercial hosters, JoinGonka takes it directly from a decentralized network.

What the table shows: the price spread is enormous — from $0.0062/1M at the cheapest (JoinGonka Gateway) to $30/1M at the most expensive (GPT-5.5 output). Even among centralized providers, the difference is huge: Gemini 3.7 Flash is several times cheaper than the flagship output of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Note on quality: GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 are frontier models with the best benchmarks. MiniMax M2.7, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash are strong open-source models that, for many tasks — coding, text analysis, content generation, agentic scenarios — yield results comparable to GPT-5.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6. For 90% of tasks (chatbots, automation, RAG, summarization), the difference in quality is unnoticeable, while the price difference is thousands of times.

Hidden costs: some providers charge different prices for input and output tokens. At OpenAI, input costs $5.00 and output costs $30.00/1M. At Anthropic: $5.00 input and $25.00 output. At JoinGonka Gateway, both rates are fractions of a cent: input $0.0062/1M, output $0.019/1M. Output is more expensive than input (as with almost all providers), but hundreds of times cheaper than OpenAI and Anthropic.

Usually comparing AI API prices is complicated by differences in models: every provider has its own flagship, and "cheaper" often means "weaker." With DeepSeek V4 Flash that caveat doesn't apply — in August 2026, governance proposal #94 added it to the Gonka network, and now the same model is served both by regular inference platforms (via OpenRouter) and by the decentralized network. DeepSeek itself retired V4 Flash from its API on September 10, 2026: requests under the old name are now handled by a different model — DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash (currently version 1017). The weights are identical (an open MoE model with 284 billion parameters, ~13 billion active, MIT license), and the API is OpenAI-compatible in both cases. What differs is infrastructure, price, and context window: ours is 380K tokens, OpenRouter platforms offer up to 1M.

What this means on your bill. A million input tokens of the same model on OpenRouter costs from $0.059; with us — $0.0062. At 100M tokens per month (a typical load for an agent that reads documentation and a codebase), that's from $5.90 on OpenRouter and about 10 times less with us — with the same answer quality, because it's literally the same model.

How to switch. No code changes needed: same base_url, same key, and in the model field — deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731. For clients like Claude Code and Cline there's an installer: npx @joingonka/setup --model deepseek (other network models — --model glm and --model minimax). How to connect DeepSeek V4 Flash to Claude Code and what a task will cost — in the guide Claude Code + DeepSeek V4 Flash. A detailed breakdown of the model — specs, benchmarks, and comparison with other network models — in the article DeepSeek V4 Flash on the Gonka Network.

JoinGonka Gateway isn't just another hosting service for AI models. It's a gateway to the decentralized Gonka Network, and it's precisely the network's architecture that explains the record-low prices.

No data centers: Gonka Network is 1,293 GPUs (H100, H200, B300, and others) provided by independent hosts around the world. Hosts earn GNK tokens for performing AI computations. No data center leases, no corporate overhead, no brand markup.

Proof of Useful Work: unlike Bitcoin (where mining wastes energy), computations on Gonka are AI tasks. Miners earn GNK for processing your requests, and according to the network's documentation, nearly 100% of computing power goes to useful work.

0% fee when paying with GNK: if you top up your JoinGonka Gateway balance with GNK tokens, there's no deposit fee — the full amount is credited to your balance. Topping up with WGNK from Ethereum — 1%. Paying with USDT — 5%, lower on large amounts: that's the cost of conversion and convenience.

The same model — about 5–45 times cheaper: Gonka's open models (GLM-5.3 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiniMax-M2.7) are also available on regular inference platforms. On OpenRouter, the cheapest providers charge $0.0285 per 1M input and $0.0923 output for GLM-5.3 Flash, from $0.059/$0.14 for DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (DeepSeek itself has already retired this version from its API in favor of V4.1 Flash), and from $0.21/$0.84 for MiniMax-M2.7. JoinGonka Gateway charges ~$0.0062/1M input and ~$0.019/1M output — many times cheaper on the exact same model weights. Detailed breakdown — in the articles JoinGonka Gateway: full review and cheap alternative to OpenRouter.

Three API formats: JoinGonka's gateway to Gonka Network models accepts requests in OpenAI Chat Completions (/v1/chat/completions), OpenAI Responses (/v1/responses), and Anthropic Messages (/v1/messages) formats. That means any tool — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI, LangChain, n8n — works without modifications.

Connecting to the cheapest AI API takes 2 minutes:

1. Sign up: open gate.joingonka.ai and create an account. Email + password — a standard form, no crypto or wallets.
2. Free tokens: when you sign up you get 3M free tokens. That's enough for thousands of requests — plenty to test the API in your project.
3. Create an API key: in the Dashboard go to API Keys → Create Key. The key starts with jg-. It's shown once — save it.
4. Connect: replace base_url in your app with https://gate.joingonka.ai/v1. For the Anthropic format, the base URL is https://gate.joingonka.ai, without /v1.

Connection examples for popular tools:

• OpenCode — JoinGonka provider with a single installer command
• Claude Code — a single installer command: address, key, the network's model and its context window
• Codex CLI — a provider block in config.toml on the Responses API
• Cursor — your own key and address in the model settings
• DeepSeek Harness — a custom provider in Settings → Models
• Pi — a provider in models.json or a single installer command

Detailed guides with code examples (curl, Python, TypeScript) are in the API quickstart.

Dashboard: after signing up you get a full-fledged control panel — balance, request history, daily spend, API keys, referral link. Everything is transparent and under control.