LLM API Hidden Costs Production Pricing: The Multipliers That Dwarf Model Selection
Every LLM pricing comparison will tell you that GPT-4.1 at $2/$8 per million tokens beats Claude Sonnet at $3/$15. None of them mention that the same Llama 4 model costs $0.20 or $0.30 per million input tokens depending which of four providers you route to—or that your actual bill is determined less by model choice
