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Ways to buy model access

Gateways, cloud and data platforms, and developer hubs: what each adds to the token price.Updated 5h ago

3 of 22 gateways and platforms

Gateway or platformFee on tokens
Developer hubs
Hugging Face Inference
Pass-through at each provider's rate with no Hugging Face markup; pay as you go on your HF account, or bill directly to the provider with your own key · BYOK yes · 200+ models
List price
Cloudflare Workers AI
Neurons: $0.011 per 1,000 Neurons, with per-model token prices published as the Neuron equivalent · BYOK no · See page models
Not published
NVIDIA NIMUnverified
Hosted API endpoints free for NVIDIA Developer Program prototyping; production self-hosted NIM requires an NVIDIA AI Enterprise license from $4,500 per GPU per year (about $1 per GPU per hour in the cloud); no per-token price · BYOK no · n/a models
Not published

A tick means the vendor's own pricing page or docs say so; a dash means we did not find it stated. An amber dot marks a row with facts we could not confirm.

Claude Sonnet 5 through each

Calculator

100M input and 20M output tokens a month: $400.00 direct from the lab.

Questions

What is an AI gateway?

A proxy between your app and model providers that gives you one API for many models, with fallbacks when a provider fails, caching, logs, rate limits and spend controls.

OpenRouter vs Vercel AI Gateway: which is cheaper?

Vercel AI Gateway states no markup and no platform fee on tokens. OpenRouter passes provider prices through but charges a fee when you buy credits (5.5% by card). With your own keys, OpenRouter's first allowance is free and then 5%.

What is BYOK?

Bring your own key: you give the gateway your own provider API key, pay the provider directly, and the gateway charges nothing or a small fee for routing.

Is Claude or GPT more expensive on Bedrock, Azure or Vertex AI?

Usually not in the default region: AWS Bedrock, Azure AI Foundry and Google Vertex AI mostly charge the lab's own list price, and some regional endpoints add about 10%. Each platform page lists every model it sells with the premium against the direct API.

How do Snowflake Cortex and Databricks price LLM calls?

In their own units: Snowflake bills Cortex AI functions in credits per million tokens and Databricks bills Foundation Model APIs in DBUs per million tokens. Their pages here convert those to dollars and state the credit or DBU price assumed.

Can I self-host an AI gateway?

Yes. LiteLLM, Portkey (gateway core) and Helicone publish open-source gateways you can run yourself; you pay only for hosting.

Pricing as read from each vendor's own pages on the date shown; your contract may differ. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

Weekly: LLM API list prices that changed, Thursday mornings.