How much does an LLM charge per hour for its services?
If we multiple the Cost Per Output Token with Tokens Per Second, we can get the cost for what an LLM produces in Dollars Per Hour. (We’re ignoring the input cost, but it’s not the main driver of time.)
Over time, different models have been released at different billing rates.
New powerful models like O3 cost ~$7/hr – Poland’s minimum wage rate.
Gemini 2.5 Pro costs ~$12/hr – France’s minimum wage rate.
The latest Claude 4 Sonnet costs ~$2/hr – India’s minimum wage rate.
Once a language model’s run-time cost drops below the local minimum wage, the “offshoring” advantage disappears. AI becomes the cheapest employee in every country at once.
Paradoxically, workers in countries with strong labor protections, unions, and higher wages (like Germany and France) may be safer from AI displacement.
But countries whose economies depend on wage arbitrage face economic disruption.
- Visualization: https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/23384855/
- Analysis: https://chatgpt.com/share/68317a06-0cac-800c-ad6f-13646ceb489f
- Source code: https://github.com/sanand0/llmpricing/blob/9b66480458b712de52ea14502a64bf4c3b6a98ed/billing.py
