TokenScale claims one thing: that it reads each provider's official pricing page every night and writes down what it said. This page is where that claim gets audited. Every night the record missed is listed below, with the reason. If the numbers here look worse than you expected, that is what an honest record looks like.
A freshly verified night means a human-readable price was read from the provider's own pricing page that night. A carried-forward night means the check did not complete and the previous price was held. Those days are drawn in grey on every chart, and they stay grey: a later check confirms only its own date, it cannot reach back and confirm one it missed. The gap is part of the record.
Disclosure is the commitment here, not perfection. The verification rate will never be 100%, because the checks run on real machines in the real world. The commitment is that every night the record missed appears on this page, with the reason.
The site launched on 18 May 2026; the first automated nightly point landed on 19 May. Coverage grew with the site: 16 providers from 19 May, 21 from 2 June, and all 22 from 26 June, when Sakana AI joined the board.
| Nights | Run | What happened | Disclosed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 27–30 May | 4 nights | The nightly job wrote prices it could not actually confirm at source. A data audit on 31 May caught it and reverted all 36 affected points to the last verified values. The public site never showed the bad numbers, but those nights were not verified. | This page, 4 Aug 2026 |
| 31 May | 1 night | Both the primary and the backup nightly jobs skipped the run entirely. The miss was found the next day and the previous prices were held. | This page, 4 Aug 2026 |
| 13 Jun | 1 night | The nightly carried every tier forward unchanged without reading the sources. A full re-verification the next day confirmed most values as correct and fixed six tier mappings it found along the way. | This page, 4 Aug 2026 |
| 13–17 Jul | 5 nights | A macOS update reset a permission the scheduled job needed, and it failed quietly five nights in a row. Not detected from inside the system; it took three nights to notice. The job now raises an alarm the moment it fails. | Changelog, 18 Jul 2026 |
| 1–3 Aug | 3 nights, ongoing | The nightly kept appending data but no verification pass ran and no provider was stamped as checked. Found on 4 August while auditing the site against its own record. This run ends when the next successful check lands; until then these nights stand as carried forward. | This page + journal, 4 Aug 2026 |
How this table was built, honestly. Before 4 August 2026 the record did not store each night's verified-or-carried status; it can now, permanently, in the data itself. The rows above are reconstructed from build logs and the change log. If a missed night ever surfaces that this table does not show, it gets added, dated, with the reason, and the correction is noted in the changelog.
Verification is per provider page, not all-or-nothing. On most verified nights all 22 pages read cleanly; on some, a page that will not render without scripts gets held while the rest verify. Three providers currently lag the rest of the board: AWS Bedrock was last read directly on 23 June 2026 (its pricing page is script-gated; the values are cross-checked against Anthropic's published list prices), and SambaNova and Meta Llama were last read on 6 July 2026 (Meta's official pricing page currently 404s, so its figures trace to third-party hosts). Their charts are grey from those dates, and each provider's info sheet on the calculator shows its own last-verified date.
List price is not effective price. Prices are recorded as published, in dollars per million tokens. On 30 June 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 shipped with a new tokenizer that turns the same text into roughly 30% more tokens at an unchanged per-token rate: a real cost increase that never appeared on a pricing page. TokenScale records the published rate; it does not yet measure cost per unit of actual work.
Token estimates are an average. Roughly 1.33 tokens per word, which holds for typical English prose and will not hold for your code, your JSON, or your Mandarin.
The nightly record starts on 19 May 2026. Anything earlier is a baseline drawn from the sources available at the time, and is marked as such on the charts.
Promotional rates never enter the history. They are shown live, clearly labelled, and excluded from the record, because a limited-time rate is not what the thing cost.
You don't have to take my word for any of it.
Starting 5 August 2026, TokenScale's key pages are submitted to the Internet Archive every night by a watchdog that runs outside the machine the nightly runs on. That builds a third-party, timestamped copy of what this site said on any given date, one I don't control and can't edit. Earlier snapshots exist too: the Archive holds captures of this site going back to its launch window, through 9 June 2026, which corroborate the early record.
The providers' own pricing pages are archived on a rotating schedule as well. Where those captures work, you can compare what TokenScale recorded against an independent snapshot of the source. Where a provider's page is JavaScript-rendered and archives as an empty shell, that provider will be marked here as not independently checkable, because pretending otherwise would defeat the point. A provider-by-provider table appears here once the watchdog has a full week of archive results to report.
Tell me and I'll correct it in public, in the changelog, within a day. Use the "Report a pricing error" link in the calculator's footer, or email will@biltonprojects.com. That is the whole arrangement.
Last updated: 4 August 2026. The numbers above run through the night of 3 August; they are refreshed as the record grows.