Same Question, Different Model — A 45x Cost Difference: Token Economics in Practice

GPT-4-level performance now costs 1/100th of what it did two years ago. As of March 2026, the price gap between "budget" and "premium" LLM models exceeds 1,000x. Mistral Nemo runs at $0.02 per million tokens. o3 Pro runs at $375. Same concept - "LLM API call" - four orders of magnitude apart in price. Understanding and exploiting this gap is Token Economics. Automating the exploitation is Model Routing. Tokens as Currency In the LLM world, tokens are money. Literally. A token is the smallest unit of text an LLM processes. In English, roughly 4 characters equal one token.