Three prices for the same thing, and only one of them is the price

There are three different prices for the same thing, and only one of them is the number on the label. The other two decide whether the label was honest.

The price per request

A paid API has a price per token, and people quote it as if it were the cost. It is one factor of three: tokens per request, requests per day, days in the month.

The part people forget is that the first factor is yours. A longer prompt is not the same product, and the difference shows up on the invoice before anything else does.

CostUse prices it properly, by model, with the published rate, the source and the date the rate was checked, at https://costuse.com.

The price in another country

The same logic applies when the currency is not the currency you think in. A service priced in dollars and used in a country where the local price is different has a real cost that the dollar figure hides.

Kunibetsu does that comparison, including the parts nobody lists, at https://kunibetsu.com.

The price before you decide

And there is a third one that arrives later and is the reason people get caught. You compared the products on the criteria that were easy to compare, and the difference in the criteria that mattered was not visible until the purchase.

Desenterra writes the criteria out per product before the list, at https://desenterra.com.

None of this is complicated arithmetic. It is the difference between a number you looked up and a number you can act on.