Provider pricing
01.AI AI API pricing
01.AI (founded by Kai-Fu Lee) builds the Yi family of open-weight models. Yi-Lightning is the current API flagship — a competitive MoE with strong bilingual Chinese/English performance and pricing well under $0.50/M tokens, putting it among the best price-performance options in the open-weight tier.
Founded2023
HeadquartersBeijing, China
Tracked models6
Best for
Cost-sensitive teams wanting frontier price-performance and bilingual support.
Strengths
- Yi-Lightning: top-3 LMSYS Arena scores at sub-$0.50/M pricing
- Open weights for the Yi 1.5 series — Apache-licensed
- Strong bilingual Chinese + English performance
- Available on platform.lingyiwanwu.com and Together/Fireworks mirrors
Tracked 01.AI models
| Model | Input $/M | Output $/M | Context | Tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yi-Lightning | $0.140 | $0.140 | 16,384 | Flagship | Low-latency flagship for chat and reasoning |
| Yi-Large | $3.00 | $3.00 | 32,768 | Flagship | Bilingual EN/ZH reasoning model |
| Yi-Medium | $0.500 | $0.500 | 16,384 | Mid-tier | Balanced cost-quality model |
| Yi-VL Plus | $0.500 | $0.500 | 16,384 | Mid-tier | Bilingual vision-language model for charts and OCR |
| Yi-Coder 9B | $0.100 | $0.100 | 128,000 | Open Source | Open-weight 9B code model — competitive with 33B on benchmarks |
| Yi-2 Lightning | $0.200 | $0.200 | 32,768 | Flagship | Next-gen Yi — low-latency bilingual flagship for chat and reasoning |