Cohere's oldest model costs six times more than its newer replacement — and has no shutdown date to force anyone off it

Cohere's pricing page carries a quiet section headed "Where do I find pricing for our legacy models?". It lists four rates for models the company no longer sells to anyone new. Command, the model that gave the family its name, is billed at one dollar per million input tokens and two per million output. Command-light costs 30 and 60 cents. Both run on a 4,000-token context window. The comparison with what Cohere sells today is not close. Command R 08-2024 handles 128,000 tokens — thirty-two times more — for 15 cents per million input tokens. That is one-sixth of what a customer still on Command is paying. Command R7B, the small model released in December 2024, costs under four cents per million input tokens, roughly one twenty-seventh of the Command rate, and also carries the 128,000-token window. What makes this durable is the absence of a deadline. Cohere's own lifecycle policy defines a deprecated model as one that is closed to new customers but stays available to existing users "until retirement", with a shutdown date "assigned at that time". For the five models deprecated in September 2025 — command, command-light, command-r-03-2024, command-r-plus-04-2024 and the Summarize endpoint — no such date has been published. The company has shown it will set one when it means to: the April 2026 retirement of Embed v2.0 and two Aya 8B models was announced with a firm date and named replacements. Deprecation also closed fine-tuning for the classic Command models, and previously fine-tuned versions stopped being accessible. So the customers who remain are running an unmodifiable 2022-generation model, on the shortest context window Cohere has ever sold, at the highest per-token price in the company's public price list — with nothing on the calendar to make them move. wujec.ai has added catalogue profiles for Command and Command-light, completing the classic Command line alongside the Command R and Command A families.