Tidelines — LLM usage and market share

Spend · 2026-10-01

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

332.8

+29.7 pts · 30d — the average token is more expensive.

Median $ / M paid

$0.395

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 $3.33 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 2026-10-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/spend

Volume vs price

Average token price rose 232.8% since 2025-01-01; estimated daily spend rose 79.2% over the last 30 days. Source: Tidelines, 2026-10-01.

Tracked tokens / day

23T

Est. spend / day

$47.5M

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 47603.3% over the last 639 days of archive to 23.45T/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.)
  • 7.4%
    Anthropic+28.0
    35.4%
  • 31.1%
    DeepSeek-17.9
    13.2%
  • 10.2%
    OpenAI+6.2
    16.4%
  • 11.9%
    Z-AI-1.7
    10.3%
  • 8.9%
    Xiaomi-7.8
    1.1%
  • 7.8%
    Tencent-2.3
    5.5%
  • 7.4%
    Other-6.6
    0.8%
  • 1.4%
    Moonshot+4.1
    5.5%
  • 5.3%
    Nvidia-2.0
    3.3%
  • 3.8%
    Google-0.6
    3.2%
Data: OpenRouter tokens × list price as of 2026-10-01 · 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 2026-10-01 · Source: tidelines.ai/spend

As of 2026-10-01