LLM API providers compared — cheaper and more European than you think
The Bridge is provider-agnostic: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, the provider behind it is a base URL. And because Saklam is a flat rate, we earn nothing on token usage — so this list is what it should be: neutral.
Last updated: 2026-08-17. All prices come from the providers' public price lists (per 1M tokens, input → output), no guarantee — token prices change fast, always check the linked original price list before deciding.
First, some perspective: what does your workload actually cost?
Example for a small team: 3 users, 20 requests per working day each (typical request: ~3,000 input tokens, ~800 output tokens, 21 working days) — roughly 4.8M tokens per month:
| Model | Monthly cost (whole team) |
|---|---|
| Claude Fable 5 (most expensive flagship) | ~$88 |
| GPT-5.6-sol (OpenAI flagship) | ~$49 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | ~$18 |
| GPT-5-mini | ~$3 |
| gpt-oss-120b at an EU host | ~€1–2 |
For interactive use, token cost is rarely the real problem — even the most expensive model in the world costs this team less than $30 per seat. Model choice starts to matter once agents and automations run and volume grows 10–100×. That's exactly when it pays off that your provider is just a base URL.
EU providers: hosting in Germany and France
Open frontier-class models (Llama, Qwen, gpt-oss, Mistral) are available from European data centers — often 10–50× cheaper than the flagships, with a DPA and no training on your data:
| Provider | Hosting | Sample prices (1M tokens) | Privacy | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS AI Model Hub | 🇩🇪 Germany | gpt-oss-120b €0.15 → €0.65 · Mistral Small 24B €0.10 → €0.30 · Llama 3.3 70B €0.65 → €0.65 | DPA, no training on customer data, BSI C5 attestation | Only provider with German hosting + C5 + a public price list |
| OVHcloud AI Endpoints | 🇫🇷 France | gpt-oss-120b €0.08 → €0.40 · Llama 3.3 70B €0.67 → €0.67 | Zero data retention (billing data only) | Cheapest verified EU price; have the processing region confirmed contractually |
| T-Systems AI Foundation Services | 🇩🇪 T-Cloud (open-source models) | Flat €0.20 → €0.65 across all shared plans | EU data sovereignty, ISO 27001 | Pick the T-Cloud models only — GPT/Claude/Gemini run on Azure/GCP there |
| Scaleway Generative APIs | 🇫🇷 France | gpt-oss-120b €0.15 → €0.60 · Qwen3.5-397B €0.60 → €3.60 | GDPR docs available; request DPA details | Broadest EU model catalog (incl. GLM, DeepSeek models) |
| Mistral La Plateforme | 🇫🇷 France (EU entity) | Mistral Small 4: $0.15 → $0.60 · Mistral Large 3: $0.50 → $1.50 | No training on API data; default 30-day abuse retention, zero data retention only on the Scale plan | Only EU provider with its own frontier model |
| STACKIT AI Model Serving | 🇩🇪 Germany | Pricing on request (no public list) | BSI C5 Type 2, SOC 2, no US CLOUD Act exposure | Schwarz Group; deepest certification stack in the field |
For reference: the big US providers
| Provider | Model | Price (1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | GPT-5.6-sol | $5.00 → $30.00 |
| GPT-5-mini | $0.25 → $2.00 | |
| Anthropic | Claude Fable 5 | $10.00 → $50.00 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 → $10.00 | |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 → $5.00 | |
| Google Gemini | Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | $0.10 → $0.40 |
Two levers many teams overlook: prompt caching (repeated context costs ~10% of the input price at OpenAI and Anthropic) and batch processing (–50% on everything when it doesn't have to be interactive).
US specialists like Together AI, Fireworks or Groq host open models even cheaper — but for European companies that usually means US processing, standard contractual clauses plus a transfer impact assessment, and an EU region that can't always be guaranteed.
What to check before choosing
- OpenAI compatibility — then switching is a base URL, not a project.
- DPA publicly available — not hidden behind enterprise sales.
- No training on your data — as an explicit commitment, not silence.
- Retention — zero data retention is the gold standard; 30-day abuse logging is common and should be a conscious decision.
- Processing region — an "EU provider" doesn't automatically mean EU processing; fix it contractually when in doubt.
Two setups we'd flag: the DeepSeek platform used directly (processing and storage in China per their own privacy policy, training on an opt-out basis) — the DeepSeek models themselves are fine via EU hosts — and aggregators like OpenRouter for sensitive data (an additional processor, and the routing target per request isn't deterministic).
The switch itself: one line
The Bridge sits in front of your provider and masks personal data before it leaves the building. Which provider answers behind it is your call, set in the Bridge's .env — Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Google, AWS Bedrock and Mistral directly via API key, and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (including the EU hosts above or your own vLLM/Ollama) via base URL:
# Bridge .env — switch providers without touching your applications
MISTRAL_API_KEY=… # e.g. Mistral directly
# or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint:
OLLAMA_API_BASE=https://your-eu-endpoint.example/v1
Your applications keep pointing at the Bridge — nothing changes for them when you switch providers. Bridge setup guide →
