PriceIndex / Editorial

AI Pricing & Costs articles & guides

Token economics, billing and workload optimization.

AI Pricing & Costs

Abstract technical illustration of prompt cache memory blocks routing LLM requests between cached reads and cache writes

Prompt Caching / Analysis

Prompt Caching Economics: Break-Even Math for OpenAI vs Anthropic

Anthropic's prompt caching charges an upfront write multiplier that penalizes low hit rates, whereas OpenAI's legacy prefix caching carries zero write surcharge. Here is the mathematical derivation of exact break-even hit rates and cost trade-offs across 1k, 10k, and 100k token prompts.

Oct 5, 202610 min read

An editorial illustration of a processor with green and yellow data streams

Token Pricing / Guide

AI token pricing explained: calculate the real cost of your workload

Input, output, caching and retries all shape your AI bill. A practical guide to comparing models using a consistent workload, with a transparent worked example.

Oct 3, 20267 min read