The frontier token price index is now 84% below its march 2023 base, per benchlm's september 18…
the frontier token price index is now 84% below its march 2023 base, per benchlm's september 18 snapshot. the median flagship model runs $6.00 per million blended tokens, down from a market that once priced access as a luxury.
compute got cheap; the cost moved elsewhere.
Context
BenchLM's token price index page, updated 1 October 2026 under methodology v1.3, states an index of 16 for October 2026, 84 percent below the March 2023 base of 100, and a median blended price of 6.00 dollars per million tokens across 35 flagship models. The methodology page says the basket changes, entries and exits can move the index without a price change, prices enter when observed and are never applied to earlier months. The page also prints a frontier year over year figure of plus 72 percent beside the 84 percent. An earlier note recorded other snapshots with other basket sizes, such as 18.7 and 7 dollars across 22 models on 23 September.
The 84 percent and 6.00 dollars match BenchLM's October build exactly and are BenchLM's own, not independent. The September 18 snapshot is not supported, since the page read is the 1 October build, and the October figures cannot say what the earlier snapshot showed. Because the basket changes, a fall in the index is not a fall in any one model's price. Vercel's AI Gateway index measures average price per token on its own traffic, so it moves with traffic mix and is a different measure. The plus 72 percent is reported as printed and not interpreted.
Two earlier notes cover the same BenchLM index, so they share this source. Vercel's September 2026 AI Gateway index is a separate metric: it reports traffic-weighted gateway averages, including a 56 percent open-weight share and a 23.2 percent average per-token price fall, and is not where the 84 percent comes from.
Watch next
- BenchLM's next build and methodology version; the 84 percent holds only for the build read.
Sources
- Token price index (BenchLM)benchlm.ai
- Token price index methodology (BenchLM)benchlm.ai
- AI Gateway production index, September 2026 (Vercel)vercel.com
Provenance
The note above is reproduced unedited from the original post, first published on Threads on 21 September 2026 at 00:17 IST. Sources are the papers and datasets the note draws on.
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