i mean this is difficult to calculate because of prompt cacheing, the ratio of input/output token etc, but if you just do some napkin math, i find it hard to believe people are getting this many tokens on a $20 plan.

heres some napkin math

gpt oss 120b is in/out price at 0.039/ 0.18 per million on open router. heres some assumptions.

1. the ratio of input/ouput is about 25/1. (coding is mostly grep and fairly low outpu)

2. you are getting 75% prompt cache reads

Case B: 50% Prompt Caching Discount (Standard Provider Rate)At 75% Prompt Caching:Total Tokens Obtained: 658,749,010 (approx. 659 Million tokens)

Input: ~633mil

~475 mil cached at 50% input pricing = ~$9.25

~158 mil uncached = ~$6.15

tokensOutput: 25mil tokens ($4.5)

This doesnt even account for profit margins on inference providers, or the fact that openAI probably has a much more efficient inference stack.

its really hard to know what these companies are actually paying, but from everything im hearing, people are reporting API inference pricing is 50% margin.