Innovare Index
The Innovare Index
Weekly posted-price index for frontier AI capability. Ten flagship models, geometric-mean blended pricing, published every Saturday. Curated independently by Innovare Melbourne.
Week of 1 June 2026 · Edition 003
Innovare Index · Week of 1 June 2026
$5.09
Geometric mean blended USD per million tokens · 10 models · TPI-comparable methodology
Public TPI reference
$2.17 · n = 19
Innovare sits above the public Token Price Index because it deliberately excludes the ultra-cheap long tail. The Index is a buyer-side reference for organisations choosing among current flagship models, not a comprehensive market average.
This week
Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 on 9 June, a new tier above Opus priced at $10/$50 per million tokens. The frontier just split: a price-quality elite above the existing premium models. Posted prices for every other tracked model held flat. The Index lifted because composition changed, not because anyone moved.
Fable 5's pitch is multi-day autonomous agent work — "hand off, review completed work." It tops the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 65, four points clear of Opus 4.8. The 9-day window before Anthropic's 15 June subscription split is the most operationally consequential calendar item for buyers running automated agents on Claude seats today.
Beneath the headline, the cheap-tier price floor continues to drift down. MiniMax-M3 at $1.14 blended now matches Kimi K2.6 on cost while scoring higher on the AA Intelligence Index. That convergence — frontier-grade reasoning at sub-$2 blended — is the underreported story of mid-2026.
Index members · Week of 1 June 2026
| Model | Provider | Blended $/M | LN(blended) | AA Rank |
|---|
| FrontierClaude Fable 5 | Anthropic | $22.00 | 3.091 | 1▲ new |
| PremiumGPT-5.5 | OpenAI | $12.50 | 2.526 | 3▼2 |
| PremiumClaude Opus 4.8 | Anthropic | $11.00 | 2.398 | 2▲ new |
| MidClaude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | $6.60 | 1.887 | 18▼3 |
| MidGPT-5.4 | OpenAI | $6.25 | 1.833 | off top 20 |
| PremiumGemini 3.1 Pro | Google | $5.00 | 1.609 | 6▼2 |
| MidQwen3.7 Max | Alibaba | $4.00 | 1.386 | 8▼1 |
| CheapClaude Haiku 4.5 | Anthropic | $2.20 | 0.788 | off top 20 |
| CheapKimi K2.6 (open) | Moonshot | $1.865 | 0.624 | 12▼2 |
| CheapMiniMax-M3 | MiniMax | $1.14 | 0.131 | 11▼1 |
Blended price uses input × 0.7 + output × 0.3, the same formula as the public Token Price Index. Cache hits are deliberately excluded — cache-hit rate varies by workload and would make the Index harder to reproduce independently. AA Rank shows current position on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index full leaderboard; arrow shows movement since the 25 May inaugural snapshot.
Methodology
Innovare Index = exp((1/n) × Σ ln(blended_price_i)), n = 10
The Index is the geometric mean of the ten member models' blended prices, expressed in USD per million tokens. The geometric mean treats proportional differences equally — a model twice as expensive as another carries the same weight whether the comparison is $0.20 vs $0.40 or $20 vs $40. This produces a more balanced picture than an arithmetic mean, which is dominated by the most expensive entries.
The blended price for each model is input × 0.7 + output × 0.3. This is the same formula as the public Token Price Index. Cache hit pricing is excluded because cache-hit rate is a workload assumption — including it would mean the Index measures workload patterns as much as posted prices. The Index is a posted-price market reference, not a forecast of any organisation's actual bill.
The Index rises when the market composition shifts toward more expensive models, or when individual member prices rise. It falls when cheaper models enter or when prices fall. Mix changes are intentional — the Index tracks the frontier as the market defines it, not a fixed historical basket.
What the Index does not measure
Posted prices are not realised costs. Organisations typically pay less because of enterprise discounts, prompt caching, model routing, batch processing, and committed infrastructure spend. The Index is the published list price; a separate practitioner calculation incorporating cache hits and other discounts can run 50-70% lower for production workloads with prompt caching configured.
Inclusion criteria
The Innovare Index is curated to ten models drawn from at least five providers, with at least one entry in each capability tier (Frontier, Premium, Mid, Cheap). To enter the Index, a model must meet all six criteria:
01
Commercial API availability
Accessible via a paid, publicly available API with stable USD-per-million-token pricing. Free preview tiers excluded until commercial pricing publishes.
02
General-purpose capability
Supports general text generation across at least three of: summarisation, generation, reasoning, coding, retrieval. Specialist-only models excluded.
03
Market presence
Documented adoption through enterprise availability, presence in independent benchmarks, or flagship recognition from its provider.
04
Not scheduled for deprecation
Active and supported. When a provider releases a successor at similar price, the Index entry updates at the next weekly review.
05
Editorial relevance
Models that buyers in mid-market production environments are actively choosing between. This criterion is more opinionated than the public TPI; the Index is curated, not comprehensive.
06
Provider diversity
Members drawn from a minimum of five providers. Anthropic is currently over-weighted (40%) because the editor's stack runs Anthropic at the production tier — this is disclosed editorial bias.
Data sources
- Token pricing
- Pulled each Saturday from provider pricing pages: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI for Developers, Moonshot, Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax.
- Intelligence Index & Rank
- Artificial Analysis — independent third-party benchmarking. Index v4.0 aggregates 10 evaluations: GDPval-AA, τ²-Bench Telecom, Terminal-Bench Hard, SciCode, AA-LCR, AA-Omniscience, IFBench, Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA Diamond, CritPt.
- Geometric-mean methodology
- Adapted from the public Token Price Index (tokenpriceindex.com), which tracks 19 models. The Innovare Index uses the same blended-price formula so values are directly comparable, with editorial divergence on model selection.
- Historical snapshots
- Each Saturday's rates archived to an internal Notion database; full reproducibility for any past Index value on request.
About Innovare
IM
Innovare Melbourne
Building AI-native software for mid-market clients
Innovare builds AI-native systems for mid-market organisations. Practitioner-led, augmentation-not-replacement stance, opinionated about where current models earn their keep and where they don't. The Innovare Index is the public artefact of a weekly internal pricing review and was inspired by the methodology pioneered at tokenpriceindex.com.
Disclaimer
The Innovare Index is a posted-price reference for AI inference, compiled from publicly available provider pricing. It is not financial, investment, or procurement advice. Realised costs depend on workload, caching, batch processing, enterprise agreements, and other factors not modelled here. The Index is a curated subset; no model selection methodology is perfectly objective. Methodology and inclusion criteria are documented above so any value can be reproduced independently. Errors and corrections welcome — contact via Innovare Melbourne.