ernie-lite pricing
ernie-lite is priced at $0.10 per 1M input tokens and $0.30 per 1M output tokens, with roughly 240 ms to first token and about 45 tokens/sec output throughput.
Price per 1M tokens
Input $0.10 · Output $0.30 · Output/input ratio 3.0x.
- 1M input + 1M output tokens: $0.40
- 10M input + 2M output tokens/month: $1.60
- 100M input + 20M output tokens/month: $16.00
Cheaper alternatives to ernie-lite
Same workload, lower output price. Validate quality before switching.
- deepseek-v4 — $0.22/1M output (27% cheaper)
- llama-4-scout — $0.20/1M output (33% cheaper)
- phi-4-mini — $0.20/1M output (33% cheaper)
- gemini-2.5-flash-lite — $0.15/1M output (50% cheaper)
How much are you wasting on ernie-lite?
Price lists are the easy part. Run the free waste scanner on your usage export to see which calls should have run on a cheaper tier, which prompts are oversized, and which retries you paid for twice — with dollars recoverable per finding.