343 AI Models Priced Daily: The USTA AI Price Index

The price of talking to an AI model changes constantly, and no two providers post their rates the same way. The USTA AI Price Index fixes that by sealing a daily census of one marketplace's public prices. On July 13, 2026, the AI-economics clock froze the listings and published them without alteration — 343 models, priced exactly as the source posted them.

Here is the scope, stated plainly: models listed publicly on OpenRouter with their posted per-token prices, plus the Hugging Face trending list, as captured by US Tech Automations' sealed daily AI-economics snapshots. This is a census of one marketplace's listings, not of every AI model in existence.

A price index is not a recommendation; it is a snapshot of what a marketplace posted.

The Index in One Number

On the sealed snapshot, the marketplace listed 343 models from 50 providers. Prices below are quoted per million tokens, converted in code from the verbatim per-token decimal strings the source publishes. Nothing is rounded to make a point.

343 AI models from 50 providers were priced on July 13, 2026.

The number is deliberately literal. It is not an estimate of how many models "really" exist, nor a curated shortlist of the ones worth using. It is a count of distinct public listings on a single marketplace on a single day — a floor you can stand on, not a ranking you have to trust.

The 50 providers behind those 343 listings range from household-name labs to single-model open-source shops, and the index treats them all the same way: whatever price a provider posts is the price we record. No provider is weighted, promoted, or filtered for prominence.

What This Index Is — and Is Not

This edition is cross-sectional: a single sealed day, with no trend claim attached. A prior June edition of the AI Price Index used the same methodology, but we make no cross-edition comparison here — prices move daily, and two snapshots are not a trend.

This is a census of one marketplace's listings — not every AI model in existence.

The tier cutoffs later in this piece are our own methodology choices, not the marketplace's. Everything else — model counts, posted prices, context windows — is copied from the source. Where we make a judgment call, we say so and put the cutoff in the sealed display set so it can be checked.

Free, Paid, and Variable

Not every listing carries a fixed price. Of the 343 models, most post a flat paid rate, a handful are free, and a few use variable pricing that changes by request.

315 of the 343 models carry a posted paid price.

The 315 paid models are the ones this index can rank on cost; the 24 free and 4 variable listings are noted for completeness but sit outside the price tables. That distinction matters — a "free" model still costs compute somewhere, and a variable price cannot be pinned to a single per-token number on a given day.

Put differently, 315 of the 343 listings are directly comparable on cost, and the remaining 24 free and 4 variable entries are not. That the comparable set is so large is why an index built on posted prices can say something useful about the marketplace rather than dissolving into caveats.

The Three Price Tiers

Sorting the paid models by their prompt price splits them into three natural bands. The cutoffs — up to $0.50 per million, then up to $5.00 — are ours; the counts and medians are the marketplace's.

The frontier tier holds 31 models at a $10 median.

The spread is the story. The budget tier's median prompt price is $0.15 per million tokens; the frontier tier's is $10. That is a wide gap for what is nominally the same task — sending a prompt and reading a reply — and it is why "which model" is a budget decision, not just a quality one. The 158 budget models outnumber the 126 mid and 31 frontier listings combined.

The shape of that distribution is a useful signal for anyone building on these models. The bulk of the marketplace has settled into the budget and mid bands, where a $0.15 or $1.25 median prompt price makes high-volume automation affordable. The frontier tier, at a $10 median, is where you pay for the hardest reasoning — and where the index earns its keep by making that premium explicit.

The Cheapest and the Most Expensive

The extremes make the range concrete. The overall paid median sits at $0.45 per million prompt tokens and $1.75 per million completion tokens, but the endpoints are far apart.

The median paid model costs $0.45 per million prompt tokens.

From $0.010 per million at the cheapest paid model to $150 prompt and $600 completion at the most expensive, the marketplace spans several orders of magnitude. A workflow that would cost pennies on inclusionAI: Ling-2.6-flash could cost real money on OpenAI: o1-pro for the identical volume of tokens. The median is a useful anchor, but it hides how far the tails reach.

It is also worth separating the two prices most models charge. Prompt tokens (what you send) and completion tokens (what the model writes back) are often priced differently — the median completion rate of $1.75 per million runs nearly four times the $0.45 prompt rate. For output-heavy workflows, that completion price, not the headline prompt price, is the number that governs the bill.

How Much Context You Get

Price is only half the decision; context window is the other half. The median model accepts 256,000 tokens of input, and the ceiling is far higher.

80 models now advertise a 1,000,000-token context or larger.

A 256,000-token median means the typical listed model can already hold a small book in working memory. At the top, Meta: Llama 4 Scout advertises a 10,000,000-token window, and 80 models now clear the 1,000,000-token floor. Long context is no longer a frontier-only feature; it has spread well down the price ladder.

That spread has a practical edge: a workflow that needs to reason over a long document is no longer forced into the $150 tier just to get the window it requires. With 80 models at 1,000,000 tokens or more, context length and cost can now be chosen independently rather than bundled together.

What's Trending on Hugging Face

Alongside the price census, the index captures the Hugging Face trending list — a rough read on what the open-model community is downloading right now, independent of price.

The top three trending entries on the sealed day were tencent/Hy3, empero-ai/Qwythos-9B-Claude-Mythos-5-1M-GGUF, and zai-org/GLM-5.2. Trending rank is attention, not endorsement: it reflects downloads and buzz, not a quality or safety judgment from us. We list it because attention often precedes availability — today's trending open weights are frequently tomorrow's hosted, priced listings.

What AI Prices Mean for Automation Budgets

When you automate a workflow with an AI model in the loop, the model's posted price is the variable cost of every single run. A budget model at $0.15 per million prompt tokens and a frontier model at $10 are worlds apart, so model choice is often the largest line in an automation's running cost.

The practical move is to price the workflow, not the model. Our guide to how much SMB workflow automation costs monthly walks through that math, translating a per-token rate into a monthly number a business owner can actually plan around.

For teams weighing whether a frontier model earns its premium over a budget one, the business-instructor ROI framing shows how we size payback before committing to the more expensive option. Most workflows do not need the $150 model; the index exists so that choice is made on evidence, not on the assumption that pricier is better.

Questions Builders Ask

Q: How many AI models does the index track?

A: 343 models from 50 providers as of July 13, 2026, drawn from OpenRouter's public listings. Of those, 315 carry a paid price, 24 are free, and 4 use variable pricing. It is a census of one marketplace, not every model in existence.

Q: What does the median model cost?

A: The median paid model is $0.45 per million prompt tokens and $1.75 per million completion tokens. Prices run from $0.010 per million at the cheapest paid model up to $150 prompt and $600 completion at the most expensive.

Q: How are the price tiers defined?

A: The tiers are our own methodology, drawn on prompt price: budget up to $0.50 per million (158 models), mid from $0.50 to $5.00 (126 models), and frontier above $5.00 (31 models). The cutoffs appear in the sealed display set so they can be checked.

Q: Is this a trend or a snapshot?

A: A snapshot. This edition is cross-sectional — a single sealed day — and makes no trend claim. Prices are converted in code from the verbatim per-token decimals the source publishes; nothing is estimated or modeled.

Q: How much context do these models offer?

A: The median context window is 256,000 tokens, and the largest is 10,000,000 tokens (Meta: Llama 4 Scout). 80 models now advertise a 1,000,000-token window or larger.

Method and Provenance

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily AI-economics snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. Prices are per million tokens, converted in code from the verbatim per-token decimal strings the source publishes. The tier cutoffs are our methodology choices and appear in the display set.

This edition is cross-sectional only — a single sealed day. The AI-economics clock reads the OpenRouter public model listing and the Hugging Face trending list daily and content-hashes each sealed edition, so any figure here can be traced back to the exact listing that produced it.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — AI Price Index, sealed July 2026 edition, from the OpenRouter public model listing and Hugging Face trending list (a census of one marketplace's listings, not every AI model).