A Developer's Guide to AI Inference Costs in 2026
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
AI Hardware
Open Source AI
If you're building AI features in 2026, your gross margin depends on a question most developers don't have a good answer to: what does one inference actually cost? The answer isn't in the model card. It's in the physical infrastructure chain that runs from a fab in Taiwan to a data centre in Virginia. Here's how to estimate it. The easy part: API pricing If you're using an API (OpenAI, Anthropic, Together, Groq), your per-token cost is known. The hidden variable is cache-hit rate. Prompt caching drops cost by 2-10x depending on how much of your system prompt is shared across requests.