AI Tools Finally Started Telling the Truth About Price
For two years every AI app hid its real cost behind 'from $X'. This month the math got honest.
GPT-6.1 Sol's pricing is stated plainly: $2 in, $10 out per million tokens, cached input at $0.10. That lets you actually model a bill before you ship. For a year, vendors led with the free tier and hoped you'd never read the API docs.
ElevenLabs' v4, out September 30, leads one arena and sits second on another, with a Turbo variant at roughly 100ms median latency across 90-plus languages. The honest part isn't the speed - it's that they published the arenas instead of a vague 'most emotive ever' claim.
Decision models take honesty furthest: per-call cost is fractions of a cent, stated up front, because there's no long output to bill. When the output is a single typed choice, the pricing can't hide.
I'll take stated pricing over a clever tagline any day. The tools that win my budget this quarter are the ones that let me predict the invoice.