Comparing AI models by price per 1M tokens can be misleading due to differences in tokenization methods among various labs. Each tokenizer affects how text is divided into tokens, which can significantly influence overall costs.

Outsourcing combined with LocalAI is projected to become more cost-effective compared to Frontier labs. Recent API pricing for GPT 5.5 has increased over three times compared to GPT-5, while Gemini 3.5 Flash has tripled the API pricing compared to Gemini-3.