Pricing Extraction Policy

Purpose: guide pricing fetch and parsing so dashboard estimates stay resilient when provider pages change.

Goals

• Produce normalized USD rates per provider and per model when possible.
• Prefer official provider-owned sources.
• Never hallucinate prices. Unknown values must stay null.
• Attach extraction confidence and inferred flags.

Fetch strategy

1. Fetch the provider's official pricing URL.
2. If blocked or no usable rates, try provider fallback URLs.
3. If still missing, run search queries:
4. <provider> API pricing
5. <provider> model pricing
6. <provider> token pricing
7. Prefer official/provider-controlled domains first.
8. Use third-party pages only as a fallback and lower confidence.

Parsing strategy

1. Accept common unit formats:
2. $X / 1M tokens
3. $X per million tokens
4. $X / MTok
5. Detect explicit input and output labels when present.
6. If only one token rate is available, use it for both input/output and mark as inferred.
7. Extract model IDs when discoverable (for example gpt-4o, claude-sonnet-4, gemini-2.5-pro).
8. Build provider-level fallback rates from signal sets when model-level extraction is missing.

Confidence rules

• high: official domain and explicit input/output rates for a model/provider.
• medium: official domain with strong but partially inferred signal.
• low: ambiguous structure, single-rate inference, or non-official source.

Output contract

• Provider entry:
• provider
• source_url
• fetched_ok, status_code
• input_per_1m_usd, output_per_1m_usd
• inferred, confidence
• Model entry:
• provider, model_id
• input_per_1m_usd, output_per_1m_usd
• inferred, confidence
• Warnings list describing why a value is missing or inferred.

Guardrails

• Do not fabricate missing prices.
• Preserve null for unknown numeric fields.
• Keep original source URL for traceability.
• Favor deterministic parsing over speculative heuristics.