Understanding Model Costs

Different AI models have varying pricing structures based on their capabilities and computational requirements. Here's a detailed breakdown of the costs for each available model. You'll see that the cost for doing any kind of chat is very, very, low. It is quite difficult to spend more than a few cents per chat, even with the most capable models.

Real cost examples

A single, short question for Perplexity (Best):

• 363 total tokens
• $0.0005 per message
• $0.0068 total cost

A longer chat with Claude 4 Sonnet to learn about SEO best practices:

• 3,020 total tokens
• $0.05 total cost

Token-Based Pricing

Most models use token-based pricing, where costs are calculated separately for input (prompt) and output (completion) tokens. Prices are shown per 1 million tokens.

Premium Models

Claude 4 Sonnet (Our default - often smarter than GPT-4o)

• Prompt: $3.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $15.00 per 1M tokens

Grok 4 (The new hyped model)

• Prompt: $3.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $15.00 per 1M tokens

GPT-4o (The familiar ChatGPT model)

• Prompt: $2.50 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $10.00 per 1M tokens

Claude Opus 4 (Anthropic's best model)

• Prompt: $15.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $75.00 per 1M tokens

Reasoning Models

GPT-o3 (OpenAI's latest reasoning model)

• Prompt: $2.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $8.00 per 1M tokens

GPT-o3 Pro (OpenAI's premium reasoning model)

• Prompt: $20.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $80.00 per 1M tokens

GPT-o4-mini (Small reasoning model)

• Prompt: $3.10 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $4.40 per 1M tokens

Deepseek R1 (Chinese reasoning model)

• Prompt & Completion: $7.00 per 1M tokens

Efficient Models

Gemini 2.5 Pro (Google's latest with full tool support)

• Prompt: $1.25 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $10.00 per 1M tokens

Gemini 2.5 Flash (Fast and efficient)

• Prompt: $0.10 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $0.40 per 1M tokens

Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Previous generation, still excellent)

• Prompt: $3.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $15.00 per 1M tokens

Perplexity Models

Perplexity models have a unique pricing structure that combines token costs with per-request fees. Magicdoor automatically uses these when web search is needed.

Perplexity Reasoning (Our main search model)

• Prompt: $2.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $8.00 per 1M tokens
• Additional fee: $5.00 per 1,000 requests

Deep Research (For comprehensive research)

• Prompt: $3.00 per 1M tokens
• Completion: $15.00 per 1M tokens
• Additional fee: $5.00 per 1,000 requests

Cost Optimization Tips

1. Choose the Right Model: For help selecting the most cost-effective model for your needs, check our model selection guide.
2. Optimize Prompt Length: Since prompt tokens are charged, keep your inputs concise while maintaining clarity.
3. Keep conversations short: This is the most important hack. To create the sense of conversation that ChatGPT pioneered, with every message you sent, the ENTIRE conversation is sent to the model. This means chat cost increases exponentially with the length of the conversation.