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MTok pricing
Part of the Unbiased glossary: the vocabulary of LLM pricing and infrastructure, defined with receipts instead of adjectives.
MTok pricing is the industry-standard billing unit for LLM APIs: dollars per million tokens, quoted separately for input (your prompt and context) and output (the model's response). As of July 2026 the market spans $1/$5 (Claude Haiku 4.5) to $10/$50 (Claude Fable 5).
Why it matters
Every provider quotes it, and almost nobody can translate it into a bill, because bills depend on token counts that vary by model and task. Two models with identical rate cards can produce meaningfully different bills on the same prompt.
Measured: same rates, different bills
We sent one identical prompt to Claude Opus 5 and Opus 4.8, which share a $5/$25 rate card. Opus 5 wrote 4,610 output tokens; 4.8 wrote 2,877. The bills: $0.1158 versus $0.0724, 60% apart at identical prices, because verbosity is billed. Rate cards start the estimate; metered bills finish it. Full ladder with measured task costs in the pricing guide.
Common questions
How many tokens is a page of text?
Roughly 500-600 tokens for a dense page of English prose, at about four characters per token. Code runs denser, around 3.5 characters per token.
Why is output priced higher than input?
Output tokens are generated sequentially and cost more compute; the market prices the asymmetry at roughly 5x on most models.
What is a normal monthly spend?
Wildly workload-dependent: our calculator prices 1,000 daily code-generation requests at anywhere from $408/month (Haiku 4.5) to $4,080/month (Fable 5) at list rates.