The 2026 Chinese LLM Price War: Top 5 Frontier API Costs Compared
The 2026 Chinese LLM price war has seen significant reductions in API costs, with several models cutting prices multiple times. DeepSeek V4-Pro is now the cheapest option at $0.87 per million output tokens, while Xiaomi's MiMo V2.5 offers a flat rate for long-context tasks. The competition among these models is aimed at addressing various developer needs and optimizing workload management.
- ▪Chinese labs cut LLM API prices six times in the first half of 2026, with three cuts made permanent.
- ▪DeepSeek V4-Pro is priced at $0.87 per million output tokens, making it the cheapest option available.
- ▪Xiaomi's MiMo V2.5 offers a flat rate of $3 for long-context tasks, while Alibaba's Qwen3 Max is priced at $3.90.
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