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 → $0.66.
Summarized from real tool output, 1 Oct 2026.
Why
| You want to know | Without it | With model-price-radar |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest model with tools + vision + 200k context | Scroll pricing pages | find_models(needs=["tools","vision"], min_context=200000) |
| What 100k calls/month will cost on 5 models | Spreadsheet | estimate_cost ranks them with a "× cheapest" column |
| Did this model's price change? | Nobody keeps history | model_price_history since the model appeared |
| What moved in LLM pricing this quarter | price_changes lists drops, increases, newly free models | |
| Which provider serves Llama cheapest | Compare tabs | compare_providers with quantization and uptime |
How it works
flowchart LR
C[Claude / MCP client] -->|tool call| S[model-price-radar-mcp]
S --> L[OpenRouter /api/v1/models: live prices, context, capabilities]
S --> E[OpenRouter /models/id/endpoints: per-provider prices]
S --> H[Bundled monthly history 2023→build date]
S --> W[Wayback Machine: months archived after the build]
L & H & W --> C
Price history ships inside the package (18 KB, one snapshot per month since July 2023), so history answers are instant; months archived after the release are fetched from the Wayback Machine on demand and cached. Prices are US$ per 1M tokens; "blended" assumes 3 input tokens per output token.
Install
Requires uv.
Claude Code
claude mcp add model-price-radar -- uvx model-price-radar-mcp
Claude Desktop / Cursor (claude_desktop_config.json / .cursor/mcp.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
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)
MIT © Ali Altunar