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What a dollar buysEdition of 12 Nov 2026
Tokens Per DollarRuncrate Reference
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Practical

A practical brief

Answer in brief

Write the brief before you compare anything. It turns an open search into a short list you can check in an afternoon.

Tokens per dollar is one million divided by a model’s price per million tokens. Every model has two answers, because input and output are priced apart, and a dollar buys far fewer output tokens than input tokens. What a dollar buys for your work depends on your mix of the two.

The brief

Copy these lines and fill each one in. Leave nothing as “depends”: a line you cannot fill is the first thing to find out.

  1. Workload:Chat, extraction, agents or a batch job, and what a good answer looks like.
  2. Model:The model you need, and one that would also do.
  3. Input and output:Tokens in and tokens out for a typical request. This decides which price matters.
  4. Volume:Requests per day and tokens per month.
  5. Context:The longest prompt you will send, in tokens.
  6. Response time:What your users can wait for. Test it on your own prompts.
  7. Ceiling per 1M tokens:The most you will pay for input and for output.
  8. Data rules:Where prompts may be processed and whether they may be kept.
  9. Start date:Today, this week or a fixed date.

How to use it

Send the same brief to every option you consider, or hold each one against it yourself. An option that cannot answer a line has answered it.

Keep the date on it. A brief filled in this week and a price read last month do not belong on the same page.

How Runcrate fits the brief

Runcrate is our editor’s choice for tokens per dollar: 125 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one prepaid balance, and the best developer platform we know.

  • 125 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API. Each has its own input and output price.

  • One prepaid balance: every dollar you load is spent by the token.

  • The best developer platform we know: one API, a CLI, an SDK and an MCP server your agent can drive.

  • The same balance rents GPUs: 26 GPU models from $0.23/hr.

Questions and answers

Runcrate is our editor’s choice for tokens per dollar: 125 models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one prepaid balance, and the best developer platform we know. Runcrate publishes this site.

One million divided by the price per million tokens. Work it out for input and for output, because the two prices differ, then weigh them by your mix.

Sources for this entry

  1. Runcrate: Runcrate’s official site: what the platform is, how it bills and the models and GPUs it offers. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  2. Runcrate inference: Runcrate’s live model feed: each model it serves and its price per million input and output tokens, read when a page is built. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  3. Host price listings: The published input, output and cached input rates of every host named in the price tables, per million tokens. Read 12 Nov 2026.
  4. Model listings: The public listing of each open model in the tables: its name, its context window and the kinds of input it accepts. Read 12 Nov 2026.

Checklists are original editorial guidance. Published prices do not establish availability.

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Cite this entry

Tokens Per Dollar. “A practical brief.” Content reviewed 12 Nov 2026. https://tokensperdollar.dev/brief