Tidelines — LLM usage and market share

Spend · 2026-09-01

Follow the money.

LLM token volume is one race; dollars are another. Cheap AI models win volume, premium models keep the revenue. The Token Price Index v2 is the average price of a token routed through the gateway, weighted by real per-model volume (base = 100 on 2025-01-01).

Token Price Index v2

284.4

-2.0 pts · 30d — the average token is cheaper.

Median $ / M paid

$0.900

Usage-weighted blended (30/70 prompt/completion). Absolute-dollar companion to TPI.

What TPI means

If the average token cost $1.00 on 2025-01-01, it costs $2.84 today — weighted by what people actually use.

How this is computed →

Volume vs price

Daily tokens (area), estimated daily spend ($, right axis), and the Token Price Index v2 (dashed, indexed). Marker on the day of largest spend-vs-TPI divergence.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share
Data: OpenRouter rankings × current list prices as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/spend

Volume vs price

Average token price rose 184.4% since 2025-01-01; estimated daily spend rose 143.7% over the last 30 days. Source: Tidelines, 2026-09-01.

Tracked tokens / day

15T

Est. spend / day

$31.1M

List-rate estimate — ignores discounts, cached tokens, and free traffic.

Token share vs dollar share, by lab

Left bar is how much traffic a lab captures. Right bar is our estimate of how many of the dollars come home.

Tidelines — LLM usage and market share

Total tracked tokens grew 32848.1% over the last 609 days of archive to 16.19T/day — these share swings sit on top of a expanding pie.

How to read: Each row is one lab. The left bar shows its share of tokens; the right bar shows its share of estimated dollars. Wider gaps between the two mean cheap volume or premium revenue.

Token shareLabDollar share (est.)
  • 4.6%
    Anthropic+27.7
    32.3%
  • 19.2%
    DeepSeek-15.2
    4.0%
  • 16.6%
    Z-AI-9.2
    7.4%
  • 16.1%
    OpenAI+0.2
    16.2%
  • 14.7%
    Tencent-3.0
    11.7%
  • 2.0%
    Moonshot+9.2
    11.2%
  • 7.3%
    MiniMax-4.0
    3.3%
  • 6.5%
    Google+0.7
    7.2%
  • 4.2%
    Nvidia-0.4
    3.8%
  • 3.8%
    Other-3.3
    0.5%
Data: OpenRouter tokens × list price as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/spend

Dollar share = per-model daily tokens × blended list price (30% prompt / 70% completion), summed by lab and normalized. List-rate estimate, not observed revenue.

Value map: price vs momentum

Every tracked model plotted by price (x, log) and 30-day change in share (y). Bubble size is current share.

View
Tidelines — LLM usage and market share

How to read: X-axis is list price on a log scale; Y-axis is 30-day change in share; bubble size is current share. The upper-left quadrant — cheap and rising — is the winners' club.

↖ Cheap & rising · the winners↗ Expensive & rising · premium hold↙ Cheap & fading · commodity churn↘ Expensive & fading · getting displaced
Data: OpenRouter list prices as of 2026-09-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/spend

As of 2026-09-01