People hear "I replaced my OCR pipeline with a vision model" and the first thing they ask about is cost. Fair question. I assumed it would be expensive too. Under a penny per document.
People hear "vision model" and assume expensive.
Fair. I assumed the same thing.
The Bill
Under a penny per document.
GPT-4o charges about $2.50 per million input tokens right now. A document photo is maybe 1,000-2,000 tokens for the image plus a few hundred for the prompt and response. That's $0.003 to $0.008.
DeepSeek, Xiaomi Just Made Frontier AI 99% Cheaper. American Labs Went the Other Way - Decrypt
Deepseek makes its 75 percent discount permanent, pricing output tokens at least 34x below GPT-5.5
DeepSeek made its 75% discount permanent. The AI price war just escalated.
A prompt that costs $30 on GPT-5.5 costs $0.28 on DeepSeek V4 Flash. That's a 100x difference — and...
DeepSeek V4-Pro Just Got 4x Cheaper. But Here's What Nobody's Talking About DeepSeek...
Here's the thing that keeps me up at night: I just ran a batch of 10,000 customer support responses...
Honestly, when I first saw the numbers I didn't believe them. DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.25/M output vs...
OpenAI doubled GPT-5.5's list price compared to GPT-5.4, claiming shorter responses would offset the increase. An OpenRouter…
PixelRAG from UC Berkeley, Princeton, EPFL, and Databricks skips text parsing, uses screenshot tiles for retrieval, improving…
