Token Pricing: How China and the US Reprice, and the New Tiers

Dark bars are repricing of the same model; light bars are the price gap between a new generation and the one before. Looking at same-model changes alone makes the US vendors look like they only cut, because their increases all come through new generations. From July 2025 to September 2026 the US vendors raised 13 times and cut 19; 12 of the 13 raises came from OpenAI's and Google's mainstream and mid tiers. China raised 12 times and cut 4, a more consistent direction. The three generational cuts on September 22 were the first time the mainstream tier moved down together.

Each line is the launch-month list price of successive generations in the same product tier. US: OpenAI's mainstream line climbed from the GPT-5 low to $11.25, then GPT-6 Sol dropped to $4 on September 22, the first move down since August 2025; Google Flash went from $0.175 to $3 and then halved to $1.5; Anthropic went the other way, cutting Opus to $10 and then $8 while opening a $20 Fable tier above it; xAI cut with each generation to win share. China's three flagship lines only went up: Kimi five-fold, GLM more than double, Qwen up by half before a generational cut.

The mainstream chain runs from deepseek-chat through V4-Pro. Dashed lines are pricing events: February 2025 promotion expiry back to list (+173%), September V3.1 output up 50% with the night discount removed, December V3.2 cut 64%, June 2026 the V4-Pro generation, July double pricing at peak hours, August 16 five times at peak and 2.5 times off-peak. Once September list prices reflected it, the blended price went from $0.544 to $1.98, a new high for the chain. Volume did not fall after the increase, it doubled; the driver was supply that could not keep up, a price clearing a tight market rather than weak demand.

One row per model; x is the blended price, the bracket is the Artificial Analysis intelligence index. The blue band is the mainstream tier at $3 to $5.6, the orange band the flagship tier at $10 to $20. As of September 30: the two $20 flagships, Fable 5.1 and Astra, score below Opus 5.5 at $8 and Sonnet 5.5 at $4, the first time the flagship tier is not where the top scores sit; four new generations entered the mainstream tier within a month; DeepSeek V4-Pro at its $1.98 peak price scores only 36.

Left: the premium a fast or peak-hour channel charges over the standard price for the same model, mostly converging around 2x. Right: who started selling a fast channel and when, from xAI's first in April 2025 to Astra shipping with one at launch in September 2026, one vendor to six in 18 months. Token pricing has split into several dimensions: intelligence, speed, time of day and data rights.

Left: one dot per model, colour by launch period, dashed lines are each period's price frontier; on September 30 the top of the frontier sat outside the $20 tier for the first time, with Opus 5.5 buying the highest score at $8. Right: the lowest cost of reaching an intelligence score of 30, 40 or 50; the 40 line fell from $10 to $0.24 in four months, the 50 line from $10 to $4 in two. A falling application-layer bill may just mean a switch to a cheaper model of equal ability, not falling usage. Note that the cheap end of the frontier is mostly Chinese and open models; US enterprises still buy mainly from the big four.

Left: how many tokens each model burns on the same benchmark; Grok 4.7 lists at $3 but talks the most, so its task cost is high, while GPT-6.1 Sol reaches a high score with the fewest tokens. Right: CursorBench 4.0, an agentic coding benchmark; each line is one model swept across effort levels; Opus 5.5 at high effort scores almost the same as its maximum for a third of the money, the new value sweet spot; task cost and list price can differ by 17 times.

A direction gauge, not a market-wide meter: Vercel AI Gateway open data, a sample of overseas app developers that excludes direct enterprise contracts and traffic inside China, so read the direction, not the level. Chinese vendors combined: their share of tokens rose to 77% in the six weeks after the August 16 price increase and held there, their share of spend rose two weeks running to 29%, and their share of requests sits at 44%. Volume held, price went up, money came in: demand looks more price-insensitive, not less.

Left: blended price of each vendor's flagship relay across generations; steep deflation from 2023 to mid-2025, and from the second half of 2025 new flagship generations stopped getting cheaper. Right: the small-model line is the cost floor for high-volume, low-value tokens and decides whether AI features fit inside free products; small models are rising too, Haiku 4.5 costs four times 3 Haiku, and only OpenAI keeps pushing small-model prices down.

From the LiteLLM monthly price history; the size is the month-on-month change in blended price. Chinese vendors' time-limited promotions and off-peak discounts mostly do not reach list prices, so their actual count of changes is understated.