What This Walkthrough Covers
Once you've narrowed a model shortlist on the main TokenRate calculator, the Compare Prices side-by-side view is where you stack them for a decision. Each row shows the provider, the model ID (the one you'd paste into your SDK), per-1M input and output costs, the context window, and the blended quality score. This guide walks through opening the Compare Prices tool for the first time and getting a useful comparison on screen — a workflow that takes 90 seconds once you've done it twice. If you've never used /tools/compare-prices before, the first time through usually takes 90 seconds. Subsequent visits are 20 seconds. Pair this with flagship/balanced/fast/reasoning LLM tiers, Arena AI leaderboard Elo scores explained, and how LLM quality scores are calculated.
Step 1: Set Up Your Provider Dropdowns
Open /tools/compare-prices. The page loads with seven provider dropdowns: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, xAI. For this workflow, you'll want to click through 2-3 of them and tick the models you want in the grid. The dropdowns are independent — checking a model in one doesn't affect the others, and the grid updates live as you check or uncheck.
Step 2: Read the Grid
The grid has columns for input cost per 1M, output cost per 1M, context window, and quality score. Scan vertically by column to compare like-to-like. The model ID (Anthropic's "claude-sonnet-4-7", OpenAI's "gpt-5", etc.) is what you'd paste into your SDK — useful for the copy-to-implementation step. Watch for output-to-input ratios — a 5× ratio means generation-heavy workloads cost 5× more than the input rate suggests.
Step 3: Make the Decision
Three lenses to apply: (1) is the quality score above the floor for your workload, (2) does the Value column (quality ÷ input cost) rank competitively, (3) does the output cost match your expected reply length? The grid surfaces all three in one view, which is the productivity unlock over scrolling pricing pages. For tighter quality / cost shortlisting, combine with the Filter panel on the main calculator before opening the grid.
Step 4: Operationalize
Once you've picked a winner, plug the model ID and your token volume into /tools/api-cost-estimator for a monthly bill projection. For multi-model routing decisions, also check multi-model routing with quality scores. The grid pulls prices live from OpenRouter and quality from a blended Arena AI + Artificial Analysis pipeline — both refresh on a 60-minute incremental cache, so the comparison reflects current rates not a baked-in snapshot. Open /tools/compare-prices now, pick your provider dropdowns, and pin the shortlist that matches your workload.