Polarison

Methodology and open data

Last updated October 29, 2026

This page explains where every number on Polarison comes from, how we turn price sheets into cost estimates, and how to reuse our data. Prices were last verified on October 29, 2026; benchmark data was retrieved on October 17, 2026.

Prices

  • Every price is copied by hand from the provider’s official pricing page — never from resellers, aggregators or press coverage: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and DeepSeek.
  • Each model and plan stores the date its price was last verified, shown on its page and in the dataset. The date moves forward every day the automated check finds that exact price on the official page next to the model or plan name.
  • An automated job downloads every official pricing page once a day. When a price in our data no longer appears on its page, an AI model (Claude) reads the page and proposes the new price. The update is published automatically only if code confirms it: the new price must appear on the official page next to the model or plan name, in a passage quoted word for word, and the change must be within a plausible range. Anything that fails these checks is reviewed by hand. Every update is logged on the pricing changes page with a link to the official source. The last check ran on October 29, 2026 and loaded 16 of 17 pricing pages.
  • We list the standard tier in USD per 1 million tokens. Discounts (batch, flex, off-peak) and surcharges (fast or priority modes, data residency) are described in each model’s notes rather than mixed into the main price.
  • Temporary promotional prices are listed as the current price, with the end date and the future price in the notes.

Open-weight models and media APIs

  • Prices for open-weight models hosted by third-party providers come from OpenRouter’s public API, which lists each provider’s price per model. We include only endpoints that report a healthy status, and show the precision (quantization) each provider reports.
  • Image, video, speech and voice prices are copied from OpenAI, Google and xAI pricing pages. We rank models only on a shared unit — per image, per second at 720p, per minute or per 1M characters — and show token-based prices as published without converting them.

Cost estimates

cost per request = (fresh input × input rate + cached input × cached rate + output × output rate) ÷ 1,000,000

  • Monthly cost is the cost per request times the number of requests.
  • When a provider publishes a long-context threshold (for example 200K prompt tokens), prompts above it use the higher rate.
  • Rankings by price use a blended price of (3 × input + output) ÷ 4, which approximates typical chat and retrieval traffic.
  • Estimates exclude cache-write surcharges, taxes, tool fees, and volume or negotiated discounts. Tokenizers differ between providers, so the same text can produce different token counts.

Benchmarks and capability

  • Capability data comes from Epoch AI, an independent research organization, under the CC BY 4.0 license.
  • The headline number is the Epoch Capabilities Index (ECI), which combines many benchmarks into one general-capability scale. We also show GPQA Diamond, FrontierMath (Tiers 1–3), SimpleQA Verified, ARC-AGI-2, DeepSWE, APEX-Agents.
  • We only attach scores to an exact model match. If Epoch AI has not rated a model, it stays unrated instead of borrowing a sibling model’s score.
  • Scores are the best result Epoch AI recorded for each model, usually at its highest reasoning setting.
  • When two models’ ECI confidence intervals overlap, we call them roughly tied. Benchmark gaps under 2 points are treated as even.
  • A model is marked best value when no cheaper model we track, by blended price, has a higher ECI.

Open data

The full dataset — prices, limits, notes and capability scores for every model — is free to download:

  • models.json — structured JSON with sources and units
  • models.csv — one row per model, for spreadsheets
  • llms-full.txt — the same reference as Markdown, for AI assistants
  • Hugging Face — the dataset with a viewer, loadable with the datasets library
  • Kaggle — the dataset for notebooks and analysis

Polarison’s compilation is licensed CC BY 4.0: you can reuse it, including commercially, as long as you credit the source. Please cite:

Polarison, “AI API pricing and capability dataset”, https://polarison.com/data/models.json. Benchmark data: Epoch AI, “Capabilities & Benchmarking”, epoch.ai/benchmarks (CC BY 4.0).

Corrections

Providers change prices without notice. If you spot an outdated or wrong number, please contact us with a link to the official page and we will correct it.

Independence

Polarison is not affiliated with any AI provider and is funded by advertising. Advertisers have no influence on prices, scores or rankings.