AI pricing
Inference runs in the customer's cloud, so the customer pays their cloud provider for tokens on their own bill. An AI resource that nothing calls costs nothing.
Alien bills for deployment management. See Pricing for Alien's rates.
Prices on this page are the providers' list prices as of October 2026: global-endpoint rates for Claude, and AWS us-east-1 for GPT-OSS. Official pricing: Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI, Claude in Microsoft Foundry.
Token pricing
Inference is billed per token, priced per model. Output costs several times more than input on every provider.
| Model | Clouds | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | AWS, GCP, Azure | $3.00 per million | $15.00 per million |
| GPT-OSS 120B | AWS (us-east-1) | $0.15 per million | $0.60 per million |
Claude costs the same wherever it's served, because Anthropic sets the rate and the clouds resell it. Pinning Claude to a region or data zone adds 10% on every cloud ($3.30 and $16.50 per million for Claude Sonnet 4.5 on Bedrock and Vertex AI).
Model choice moves the bill far more than cloud or region: the two rows above are more than 20x apart for the same work.
Standing charges
| Cloud | Standing charge |
|---|---|
| AWS | None. Bedrock is an account-level API with nothing provisioned. |
| GCP | None. Enabling the Vertex AI API is free. |
| Azure | None. The AI Foundry account and its deployments bill per token, not per hour. |
An AI resource that nothing calls costs nothing on all three clouds.
Example: 5M input and 1M output tokens a month
A support assistant handling about 5,000 conversations a month, at roughly 1,000 input and 200 output tokens each.
| Model | Input | Output | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | $15.00 | $15.00 | $30.00 |
| GPT-OSS 120B | $0.75 | $0.60 | $1.35 |
Same traffic, same code, one field different in the request.
Kubernetes, Machines, and Local
No cloud charges. These use an external binding with your key, so you pay your provider directly at its published rates.
Free tiers
- AWS: no free tier for Bedrock on-demand inference.
- GCP: new-account credits apply to Vertex AI. There is no always-free inference allowance.
- Azure: new-account credits apply to Foundry. There is no always-free inference allowance.