AI cost · Cohere
Cohere API cost: what you actually pay
Cohere's flagship Command A (and its Reasoning/Vision/Translate variants) needs a sales conversation for real production rate limits, so budgets built on trial-key or legacy Command R pricing understate what production actually costs.
Public pricing
Token rates (USD per 1M tokens)
| Model | Input | Output | Cache read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Command Acurrent flagship; full production access gated behind contacting sales, trial keys capped at 20 req/min | $2.5 | $10 | — |
| Command R (08-2024)mid-tier, self-serve | $0.15 | $0.6 | — |
| Command R7Bcheapest current-gen model | $0.0375 | $0.15 | — |
Command A / Command A Reasoning / Vision / Translate require a sales contact for production limits (trial keys: 20 req/min, evaluation only); Command R/R7B remain self-serve at listed rates. Embed and Rerank are billed separately per call, not part of chat token pricing. Model Vault (dedicated hosting) is billed hourly/monthly ($4-$10/hr) instead of per-token.
Last updated: 2026-07-22. Sourced from Cohere Pricing (official) ↗, Command A pricing — OpenRouter ↗.
Where the real Cohere API cost hides
The sticker is the smallest part of the story. For Cohere API, these are the line items that quietly inflate the bill:
- Newest Command A Reasoning/Vision/Translate variants require contacting sales for production access; trial keys are capped at 20 requests/minute, so teams prototyping against them hit a wall before launch.
- Model Vault (dedicated deployment) bills per-hour ($4-$10/hr) or per-month regardless of utilization, so a lightly used dedicated endpoint can cost far more than serverless per-token pricing.
- Embed and Rerank are billed as separate per-token/per-call add-ons from generation — easy to under-forecast a RAG pipeline's total bill by pricing only the chat model.
What an audit finds on Cohere API
Teams budget using Command R7B's list price but route real RAG/agent traffic through Command A for quality, quietly increasing effective $/token by roughly 65x without updating cost forecasts.
Worked example: Cohere API at production volume
Take 50M input and 10M output tokens a month — a modest production workload, and a round number we picked — on Command A at the published rates above.
- Monthly
- $225
- Annual
- $2,700
- On Command R7B
- $3
Same volume, $2,660 a year apart. Most workloads are a mix — some of it genuinely needs the frontier model and some of it does not — so the real question is what share of your calls is the routine kind, and that is a measurement, not a guess.
Arithmetic on the published prices above. Your mix will differ — run your own numbers.
Cohere API pricing FAQ
Is Cohere's cheapest model good enough for production?
Command R7B is about 65x cheaper than Command A per output token, but most teams needing strong reasoning or tool-use end up on Command A, which requires a sales conversation for full production rate limits.
Does Cohere charge for embeddings and rerank separately from chat?
Yes — Embed and Rerank are billed independently from the generation model, so a full RAG stack's real cost is generation + embed + rerank combined, not just the chat rate.
How much can routing cut a Cohere API bill?
On 50M input and 10M output tokens a month, Command A costs $225 at published rates and Command R7B costs $3 — $2,660 a year apart for the same volume. What you can actually move depends on how much of your traffic is routine, which is a measurement rather than a guess.
Are these Cohere API prices current?
They were last checked against Cohere Pricing (official) and Command A pricing — OpenRouter on 2026-07-22. Every price on this page carries that date and a link to its source, and a scheduled check fails our build when any figure goes more than 30 days unverified. Vendors do change pricing between checks — the source link is there so you can confirm before you sign.
What is Cohere API really costing you?
Spendassay connects your Cohere API spend to actual usage and engineering output — a proof-level AI cost report with the wasted dollars named. Neutral across every AI vendor.
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