This page is a list of AI solutions that you can use via API for a fee
Vellum Leadboard: This website maintains a lead-board that compares prices !
Category: Frontier
Anthropic / Claude
Anthropic’s claude is probably the main competing AI to OpenAI’s ChatGPT
Anthropic has an edge over OpenAI in many areas, I personally think it is better than OpenAI for Code generation
To simply chat with Claude, you can create an account at https://claude.ai/
To obtain API keys from anthropic and access the system programmatically, you will need to get the API keys from https://console.anthropic.com/
Your .env file
In the context of my AI notes, here is what you need to know about the .env file
Any file that starts with a . is a hidden file according to linux, windows is a bot funny about such files, it allows their existance, as long as you don’t try to use windows explorer to name or rename into them.
On linux, if you want the ls command to show such files, you would execute the command “ls -a“
Now, with that out of the way, let me start with a few variables for various providers
# Open AI (ChatGPT)
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-proj-xxxx
# Google AI (Gemeni)
GOOGLE_API_KEY=xxxx
# Anthropic (Claude)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=xxxx
# Huging face (HF_TOKEN is short for hugging face token)
HF_TOKEN=xxxx
OpenAI – ChatGPT
I am not sure this requires any introduction !
While the ChatGPT app can be accessed through, the API portal is at platform.openai.com, and even though the website provides a free tier, the API does not, you must have prepaid credits in order to use it, the minimum is $5, those $5 are pay as you go, you use them up by sending more API calls.
GPT 4o is rumored to be 10 Trillion parameters !! for comparison, deepseek, which is an amazing LLM that came out lately is 671 Billion parameters, meaning it is 7% of the size of ChatGPT !
Models and API pricing
Deep Seek
What a pleasant surprise this is, something you can run locally on your computer, or use it for a fraction of the cost that comes with OpenAI or Anthropic’s Calude !
DeepSeek-V3 is completely open-source and free. (https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3)
If you don’t have the hardware resources for it, it is also available through a website identical to that of ChatGPT and an incredibly affordable API.
How affordable ?
Deep Seek: $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output tokens.
Claude AI : $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens
ChatGPT : $2.50 per million input tokens and $10.00 per million output tokens
So, the bottom line is that deep seek is fifty times cheaper than Claude AI, and around 35 times cheaper than openAI ! that is, two percent and three percent of the price, But what about quality
in most scenarios, it is comparable, in some cases Deep Seek wins, in other cases, claude or ChatGPT wins, but it is up there obviously !