Decision model pricing compared: per token vs. per request (Jev, OpenAI, Perplexity, Parallel and more)

Decision-model pricing differs primarily between token-based services for analyzing provided text and Parallel’s per-request API, which includes live web search for up to 100 questions per request. Among listed token-priced options, Perplexity Decider Flash is cheapest at $0.01 per million input tokens, followed by Perplexity Decider v1.2 and Liquid d1 at $0.02, Jev at $0.042, and OpenAI Decisions at $0.10 uncached or $0.01 cached, while outputs are generally free. In a no-web ticket-routing example involving one million 450-token tickets, token models cost roughly $4.50 to $108 monthly, compared with $1,000 for Parallel, making token pricing far more economical when all evidence is already available. Conversely, for monthly web-based CRM enrichment across 100,000 companies with 10 questions each, Parallel could cost $100 when questions are grouped per company, or about $200 when split by topic, often competing favorably with alternatives that require separate search, evidence management, and token processing; Perplexity’s built-in grounding can become costly because it charges for searches per question. The comparison notes that accuracy, latency, context limits, caching behavior, and how providers bill shared state can materially affect total costs, and recommends testing models on labeled data rather than selecting solely by list price.

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