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Research · measured 18 October 2026

What Indian languages cost on AI models

We sent the same short passage, in English, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu, to 11 AI models through Rapid Router and recorded how many tokens each provider billed for it. Tokens are what you pay for, so this is how much more the same message costs in an Indian language.

2.5×
Hindi tokens versus English, averaged over 11 models
1.3×
Most efficient for Indian languages: Sarvam 105B
6.2×
Least efficient: GLM-5.3

Tokens per language, as a multiple of English

Darker means more tokens for the same meaning. Sorted from most to least efficient across the five Indian languages.

ModelEnglish tokensHindiMarathiBengaliTamilTeluguAverage
Sarvam 105BSarvam1231.2×1.4×1.1×1.4×1.4×1.3×
Gemini 3.6 FlashGoogle1231.2×1.4×1.1×1.4×1.8×1.4×
GPT 5 MiniOpenAI1211.4×1.8×1.5×2.1×2.0×1.8×
Ministral 14BMistral1241.7×2.1×1.8×2.4×2.3×2.1×
Grok 4.6xAI1211.6×2.0×2.1×2.8×4.3×2.6×
DeepSeek V3.2DeepSeek1242.8×2.9×1.8×3.3×3.9×2.9×
Kimi K2 InstructMoonshot1212.8×2.9×2.8×4.5×4.2×3.5×
Claude Haiku 4.5 (latest)Anthropic1273.2×3.6×3.7×4.8×4.4×3.9×
Llama-3.3-70B-InstructMeta1232.4×2.8×5.6×8.3×8.9×5.6×
Qwen 3 235b A22B 2507Qwen1234.6×4.7×4.9×6.8×7.7×5.7×
GLM-5.3Z.ai1234.3×4.7×4.7×8.3×8.9×6.2×
Average across models2.5×2.8×2.8×4.2×4.5×

What it does to the bill

The input cost of 10,000 customer messages like the test passage, in English and in Hindi, at each model's live price on Rapid Router. Output tokens grow the same way, so a reply in Hindi costs more again.

ModelPrice per 1M inputEnglishHindiTamil
Sarvam 105B$0.360$0.44$0.55$0.63
Gemini 3.6 Flash$0.750$0.92$1.15$1.32
GPT 5 Mini$0.250$0.30$0.43$0.63
Ministral 14B$0.200$0.25$0.42$0.59
Grok 4.6$2.00$2.42$3.96$6.66
DeepSeek V3.2$0.260$0.32$0.89$1.05
Kimi K2 Instruct$0.750$0.91$2.55$4.11
Claude Haiku 4.5 (latest)$1.00$1.27$4.12$6.07
Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct$0.100$0.12$0.29$1.02
Qwen 3 235b A22B 2507$0.090$0.11$0.50$0.76
GLM-5.3$0.079$0.10$0.42$0.81

Method

One passage of 107 English words about a small shop using an AI assistant, translated by us into the five languages with the same meaning and register. Each version was sent once to each model through the Rapid Router API on 18 October 2026. We recorded the prompt token count each provider reported, minus the count for a one-word message, so the fixed overhead of the chat format cancels out.

Limits worth knowing: it is one passage, so treat the figures as indicative rather than exact; native writers phrase things differently from a translation; and tokenizers change between model versions, so a newer release can move a lot. Two models that share a tokenizer family, or that fall back to splitting rare scripts byte by byte, can report identical counts; that is a real result, not a copy.

A small clothing shop in Jaipur gets about two hundred customer messages every day. Most of them ask the same things: is this size available, how long will delivery take, can I return it if it does not fit. The owner used to answer every message herself late at night. Now an AI assistant reads each message, checks the stock list and the courier's tracking page, and writes a short, polite reply in the customer's own language. She reads the replies once in the morning and corrects the few that are wrong. Her customers get answers in minutes instead of hours, and she has her evenings back.

For models built for Indian languages, see the Indic collection; for quality rather than cost, the best model for each task.

Common questions

Why do Indian languages cost more on AI models?

Models bill per token, and a tokenizer trained mostly on English splits Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu text into many more pieces than the same meaning in English. More tokens for the same message means a bigger bill and less room in the context window.

Which AI model is cheapest for Hindi?

By token count alone, Sarvam 105B came out most efficient across the five Indian languages we measured (1.3× English on average). Whether it is cheapest also depends on its price per token; the cost table on this page multiplies the two.

Does this mean Hindi answers are worse?

No. This study measures tokens, not quality. A model can tokenize Hindi expensively and still answer well, or the reverse. Quality rankings are on our best-model pages.

Can I use these numbers?

Yes, under CC BY 4.0. Cite "Indian-language token study, Rapid Router, 18 October 2026 (rapidrouter.ai/research/indic-token-cost)".