# Cost of 100 ticket summaries with a ~6,000-token policy

Workload per request: system policy 24044 characters, ticket about 12 characters, answer 62 characters.
Token counts are the fake server's estimate (characters / 4). Prices are per million tokens as read on 2026-10-09.

provider, model, price sheet         cache miss    cache hit    saving
OpenAI gpt-6.1-sol                        $1.22        $0.09     92.7%
Anthropic claude-sonnet-5-5               $1.22        $0.09     92.5%
Anthropic, clock inside the block         $1.22        $1.52    -24.7%
Gemini gemini-3.8-flash (to 2026)         $0.46        $0.06     87.9%
Gemini gemini-3.8-flash (2027)            $0.92        $0.11     87.9%

"cache miss": OpenAI and Gemini with the changing clock text at the START of the system prompt; Anthropic with caching off.
"cache hit":  the clock text moved into the user message, so the system prompt never changes; Anthropic with SYSTEM_ONLY.
The Anthropic "clock inside the block" row keeps the clock at the END of the one cached system block: it changes every request, so every request pays the cache write.
