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AI decision models enter price war: Perplexity undercuts OpenAI, Microsoft

By PulseAugur Editorial · [1 sources] ·

Three companies, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Microsoft, have recently launched decision-model APIs, sparking a price war with Perplexity offering the lowest cost at $0.02 per million input tokens. OpenAI charges $0.10, while Microsoft is priced at $0.042. These models return structured probabilities rather than prose and have no output charges. Perplexity's lower price is attributed to its smaller, open-source model fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B, which allows for self-hosting, unlike OpenAI's closed model. Independent benchmark data is scarce, with most figures coming from company claims, making direct comparisons challenging. AI

IMPACT This price war could accelerate adoption of structured decision-making AI, especially for cost-sensitive applications.

RANK_REASON Multiple major companies launching competing products in a new category triggers significant industry news. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

AI decision models enter price war: Perplexity undercuts OpenAI, Microsoft

How we ranked this

Signal score
34 / 100
Composite score across the factors below. Higher = stronger signal that this story matters right now.
Newsworthiness bucket
Research
Multiple major companies launching competing products in a new category triggers significant industry news. [lever_c_demoted from significant: ic=1 ai=1.0]
Source corroboration
Single-source cluster
Only one publisher covered this so far. Single-source stories can still rank when the publisher is high-authority, but they lack cross-source corroboration.
Topics
product, infra
Editorial topic classification. Feeds into how the story surfaces on /topic/<slug> hub pages and into the per-entity coverage mix.
AI-industry relevance
High
Clearly on-topic for AI-industry coverage.
Story freshness
Breaking (< 6h)
Fresh story with cross-source coverage still developing. Ranking may shift as more sources report.

Full methodology in our editorial standards.

COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Paul Lovelace ·

    Decision Models Are in a Price War: $0.10 vs $0.04 vs $0.02

    <p>Three companies launched decision-model APIs in nine days. OpenAI charges $0.10 per million input tokens. Perplexity charges $0.02. Microsoft sits in the middle at $0.042. All three return probabilities instead of prose, all three bill $0 for output — and Perplexity's weights …

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