What AI agent workflows cost a month in LLM API fees
Cheapest listed price for this workload
$17.10 a month
DeepSeek V4 Flash (0731) at DeepInfra. $0.57 per 1,000 requests.
You're running agents that call tools in a loop, so each task makes many model calls. At our example volume, the cheapest open model we track costs $17.10 a month in API fees, from the API prices we checked on 2026-11-02. Your bill scales with your volume, so the cost per 1,000 requests is the number to carry over.
Every model we track, cheapest first
Monthly API cost at the example volume, USD. Sorted by price only: we don't rank quality, so test the cheap ones on your own prompts.
| Model | Cheapest at | Monthly | Per 1,000 requests | Priciest listing | Providers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4 Flash (0731) | DeepInfra | $17.10 | $0.57 | $35.10 | 2 |
| gpt-oss-20b | Groq | $22.50 | $0.75 | $22.50 | 1 |
| Llama 3.3 70B | DeepInfra | $28.80 | $0.96 | $265.20 | 2 |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | DeepInfra | $29.85 | $1.00 | $57.00 | 2 |
| gpt-oss-120b | Baseten | $31.50 | $1.05 | $45.00 | 4 |
| GLM-5.3 Flash | Baseten | $43.50 | $1.45 | $43.50 | 3 |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Baseten | $90.00 | $3.00 | $90.00 | 2 |
| Nemotron 3 Ultra | DeepInfra | $153.00 | $5.10 | $180.00 | 3 |
| GLM-5.3 | Baseten | $402.00 | $13.40 | $402.00 | 3 |
| Kimi K3 | DeepInfra | $897.75 | $29.93 | $945.00 | 4 |
The example volume: 2,000 agent tasks a month at 15 model calls each (30,000 calls), each call sending about 8,000 input tokens (instructions, tool results and history) and getting about 500 output tokens back. That is 240 M input and 15 M output tokens a month. Each model links to its page with every provider's input and output price and a link to that provider's own pricing page.
Self-hosting starts with $2,109.70 a month of rent
The cheapest NVIDIA H100 cloud VM we list is $2.89 per hour at RunPod, or $2,109.70 for 730 hours. The rent alone is about 123 times the cheapest API bill, so at this volume the API is cheaper; your traffic would have to grow by that much before one GPU's rent matched the API bill. That's rent only: it leaves out engineering time and idle hours, and whether one GPU can serve your traffic depends on the model, its size and your serving engine. Bigger models need several GPUs. Put your own throughput into the break-even calculator before you decide.