Hello Folks,

Today I’ll be introducing my first free tool on Price Per Token and do an analysis on GPT 5 and its pricing.

Coding Tracker

If you’re anything like me you are having Cursor and Claude Code write most of your code. Unfortunately, both are becoming more expensive with Cursor sharply cutting their “included” tokens and Claude Code introducing new rate limits. These days I am paying out of pocket for Cursor in the first 3 days of my subscription cycle.

My goal is to make Price Per Token a valuable website- beyond just a table of token prices. My first step for this is introducing my first free free tool, the AI Coding Tracker. It is a simple CLI tool that tracks your Claude Code and Cursor usage so you can stay on top of your spending so you won’t be surprised at your bill at the end of the month.

It will give you updates right in your terminal as well as a dashboard on the Price Per Token website. You can choose not to send data to my server and not use the dashboard if you want. I also pool everyone’s usage together here, taking inspiration from Open Router’s rating page.

Feel free to reach out with feedback, new feature requests or anything else.

GPT 5

I am sure everyone is well aware of GPT 5’s release yesterday. Artificial Analysis has the medium version of it at a 68 on their intelligence index, that is a big jump from GPT 4.1’s 48. There were also significant changes in the API pricing:

Notably they are all cheaper for input and more expensive for output tokens (except for nano). Whether or not the new model is cheaper mainly depends on your input : output token ratio, see below:

If you’re using GPT 5 to generate long blog posts with shorter prompts, you’re going to be paying more than before (as your input : output ratio is going to be low and you’ll be on the left part of the chart).

Here is a chart to show with caching.

With caching you actually need an even higher ratio to make GPT 5 cheaper because the more expensive output tokens become a more dominant component of the cost.

Future Updates

My dataset for token prices goes back about a week now so I will start having updates on general price changes I see in the data next time.

That’s it for now,

Alex