model-price-radar-mcp

What does each LLM cost today, and did it get cheaper? An MCP server over OpenRouter's public model catalog (~450 models) plus monthly price history since 2023, rebuilt from Wayback Machine copies of the catalog. Ask Claude (or any MCP client) for the cheapest model that can do a job, what a workload will cost, or how a model's price moved.

No API keys. One line to install.

You:    Did LLM prices really go down? Show me GPT-4o and DeepSeek Chat.
Claude: [model_price_history ×2, price_changes]
        • GPT-4o: $5 / $15 per 1M tokens until Oct 2024, $2.50 / $10 since Nov 2024.
        • DeepSeek Chat changed price 12 times since mid-2024; input went from
          $0.14 to $0.26 per 1M.
        • Not everything gets cheaper: since Oct 2025 older open models went up
          as cheap hosts dropped them, e.g. Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B input $0.04 → $0.66.

_{Summarized from real tool output, 1 Oct 2026.}

DeepSeek Chat price history by model-price-radar

Why

You want to know	Without it	With model-price-radar
Cheapest model with tools + vision + 200k context	Scroll pricing pages	`find_models(needs=["tools","vision"], min_context=200000)`
What 100k calls/month will cost on 5 models	Spreadsheet	`estimate_cost` ranks them with a "× cheapest" column
Did this model's price change?	Nobody keeps history	`model_price_history` since the model appeared
What moved in LLM pricing this quarter	Twitter	`price_changes` lists drops, increases, newly free models
Which provider serves Llama cheapest	Compare tabs	`compare_providers` with quantization and uptime

How it works

mermaid

flowchart LR
    C[Claude / MCP client] -->|tool call| S[model-price-radar-mcp]
    S --> L[OpenRouter /api/v1/models: live prices, context, capabilities]
    S --> E[OpenRouter /models/id/endpoints: per-provider prices]
    S --> H[Bundled monthly history 2023→build date]
    S --> W[Wayback Machine: months archived after the build]
    L & H & W --> C

Price history ships inside the package (18 KB, one snapshot per month since July 2023), so history answers are instant; months archived after the release are fetched from the Wayback Machine on demand and cached. Prices are US$ per 1M tokens; "blended" assumes 3 input tokens per output token.

Install

Requires uv.

Claude Code

bash

claude mcp add model-price-radar -- uvx model-price-radar-mcp

Claude Desktop / Cursor (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.json)

json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "model-price-radar": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["model-price-radar-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tools

Tool	What it does
`find_models`	Search the live catalog by name, capabilities (tools, vision, reasoning, structured outputs, audio, free), price ceilings, context
`estimate_cost`	Cost of a workload (tokens per call × calls) on up to 10 models, cheapest first
`model_price_history`	Every price change of one model since it appeared, with % changes
`price_changes`	Since a month: biggest drops and increases, newly free models, models added/removed
`compare_providers`	Same model across providers: price, context, max output, quantization, uptime

Model names are forgiving: "claude sonnet" resolves to the newest Sonnet, "llama 3.1 70b" to meta-llama/llama-3.1-70b-instruct.

Prompts: cheapest_model_for (a task → recommended model with monthly cost), monthly_price_report.

Try these

"Cheapest model with tool calling and vision for 50k support tickets a day? Show monthly cost."
"How did Claude and GPT prices change since 2024?"
"What got cheaper in LLM pricing since January?"
"Which provider serves Llama 4 Maverick cheapest, and at what quantization?"

Limits

Prices are OpenRouter's, which usually equal each provider's list price. Batch and enterprise discounts are not included.
History has one point per archived month, so a change is dated "between these two months".
Models are tracked by OpenRouter id; a renamed id starts a new history.

Part of the keyless MCP series

Open-source MCP servers that answer one market question each, with public data and no API keys.

Server	Question it answers
review-miner-mcp	What do users hate about competitor apps and games? (App Store + Steam reviews)
pricing-time-machine-mcp	How did a SaaS pricing page change over the years? (Wayback Machine)
hn-hiring-trends-mcp	Which skills are tech companies hiring for, and which are rising? (HN Who is hiring)
model-price-radar-mcp (this one)	What does each LLM cost, and did it get cheaper? (OpenRouter + price history)
launch-detector-mcp	What is a company about to launch? (certificate transparency logs)

Development

bash

uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest                              # offline tests with mocked OpenRouter + Wayback
uv run python scripts/smoke_live.py        # live check
uv run python scripts/build_history.py     # rebuild the bundled history (several minutes)
uv run --with rich python scripts/demo.py deepseek/deepseek-chat   # terminal demo (vhs docs/demo.tape records the GIF)

Model Price Radar

What it does

What it costs