Tidelines

Spend · 2026-07-14

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 2026-06-08).

Token Price Index v2

92.0

-2.1 pts · 30d — the average token is cheaper.

Median $ / M paid

$0.620

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

What TPI means

If the average token cost $1.00 on 2026-06-08, it costs $0.92 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.ai
Data: OpenRouter rankings × current list prices as of 2026-07-14

Volume vs price

Average token price fell 8.0% since 2026-06-08; estimated daily spend rose 19.7% over the same window. Source: Tidelines, 2026-07-14.

Tracked tokens / day

8.8T

Est. spend / day

$31.6M

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.ai

Total tracked tokens grew 42.7% over the last 37 days of archive to 9.31T/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.)
  • 13.1%
    Anthropic+49.5
    62.6%
  • 18.3%
    Tencent-15.2
    3.1%
  • 17.3%
    Xiaomi-16.0
    1.3%
  • 6.4%
    OpenAI+9.3
    15.7%
  • 14.3%
    DeepSeek-12.9
    1.4%
  • 6.9%
    Google-2.7
    4.2%
  • 6.6%
    MiniMax-4.9
    1.7%
  • 6.3%
    Z-AI-2.5
    3.9%
  • 5.9%
    Nvidia-1.8
    4.1%
  • 1.2%
    StepFun-0.9
    0.3%
Data: OpenRouter tokens × list price as of 2026-07-14

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.ai

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 2026-07-14

As of 2026-07-14