Cheapest LLM APIs
Current models with published list prices, ranked by blended price: three parts input to one part output, in US dollars per million tokens.
A blended price makes models with different input and output rates comparable at a glance. Your real ratio may differ: chat and retrieval apps are input-heavy, while content generation and reasoning are output-heavy, so check both columns.
Discounts can reorder this list. Batch APIs commonly halve prices for work that can wait, cached input often costs a tenth of normal input, and some providers charge more for very long prompts or less at off-peak hours. The calculator applies your own mix.
The shortlist
| Model | Tier | Weights | Context | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Inputs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3BNVIDIA | Compact | Open weights | 1M | $0.05 | $0.20 | Text |
| Ministral 3 3BMistral AI | Compact | Open weights | 256K | $0.10 | $0.10 | Text, Images |
| Granite 4.2 8BIBM | Compact | Open weights | 128K | $0.06 | $0.25 | Text |
| gpt-oss-20bOpenAI | Compact | Open weights | 128K | $0.075 | $0.30 | Text |
| Gemma 4 26B A4BGoogle | Compact | Open weights | 256K | $0.07 | $0.34 | Text, Images, Video |
| Ministral 3 8BMistral AI | Compact | Open weights | 256K | $0.15 | $0.15 | Text, Images |
| Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic | Efficient | Closed | 1M | $0.10 | $0.50 | Text, Images, PDF |
| GPT-6 LunaOpenAI | Efficient | Closed | 1.05M | $0.10 | $0.50 | Text, Images |
| Ministral 3 14BMistral AI | Efficient | Open weights | 256K | $0.20 | $0.20 | Text, Images |
| GLM-5.3-FlashZ.ai (Zhipu AI) | Efficient | Open weights | 1M | $0.15 | $0.50 | Text, Images, Video |
| Gemma 4 31BGoogle | Efficient | Open weights | 256K | $0.20 | $0.40 | Text, Images, Video |
| Mistral Small 4Mistral AI | Efficient | Open weights | 256K | $0.15 | $0.60 | Text, Images |
| gpt-oss-120bOpenAI | Advanced | Open weights | 128K | $0.15 | $0.60 | Text |
| Granite 4.2 30BIBM | Efficient | Open weights | 128K | $0.16 | $0.65 | Text |
| Qwen3.6-35B-A3BAlibaba (Qwen) | Compact | Open weights | 256K | $0.10 | $0.95 | Text, Images, Video |
| Codestral 25.08Mistral AI | Efficient | Closed | 125K | $0.30 | $0.90 | Text |
| DeepSeek-V4.1-FlashDeepSeek | Advanced | Open weights | 1M | $0.30 | $1.20 | Text, Images |
| MiniMax-M3MiniMax | Advanced | Open weights | 1M | $0.30 | $1.20 | Text, Images, Video |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash-LiteGoogle | Efficient | Closed | 1M | $0.25 | $1.50 | Text, Images, Video, Audio, PDF |
| Muse Glimmer 30BMeta | Efficient | Open weights | 128K | $0.35 | $1.50 | Text, Images, Video |
| Mistral Large 3Mistral AI | Advanced | Open weights | 256K | $0.50 | $1.50 | Text, Images |
| SonarPerplexity | Efficient | Closed | — | $0.25 | $2.50 | Text |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash-LiteGoogle | Efficient | Closed | 1M | $0.30 | $2.50 | Text, Images, Video, Audio, PDF |
| NVIDIA Nemotron 3 UltraNVIDIA | Advanced | Open weights | 1M | $0.50 | $2.20 | Text |
| Grok Build 0.1xAI | Efficient | Closed | 250K | $1 | $2 | Text, Images |
| Gemini 3.8 FlashGoogle | Advanced | Closed | 1M | $0.75 | $3.75 | Text, Images, Video, Audio, PDF |
| Gemini 3.6 FlashGoogle | Advanced | Closed | 1M | $0.75 | $3.75 | Text, Images, Video, Audio, PDF |
| Grok 4.3xAI | Efficient | Closed | 1M | $1.25 | $2.50 | Text, Images |
| Qwen3.8-27BAlibaba (Qwen) | Efficient | Open weights | 256K | $0.80 | $4 | Text, Images, Video |
| DeepSeek-V4-ProDeepSeek | Frontier | Open weights | 1M | $1.32 | $3.96 | Text |
Ordered by blended list price. Tiers are our editorial grouping of provider positioning and public benchmark standings, not our own test results. How we rank.
How to choose
- Pick the cheapest model that passes your quality bar on real tasks; the cheapest overall rarely does.
- Route easy requests to a small model and hard ones to a larger model.
- Turn on prompt caching for repeated system prompts and documents.
- Use batch processing for anything that doesn't need an answer in seconds.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest LLM API?
On blended list price, the top of this table is the cheapest as of the date shown. Small open-weight models served by inference providers and the lightest models from major labs usually lead. The cheapest model that handles your task reliably is often a different one, so test before you switch.
Why does output cost more than input?
Generating each output token takes a full pass through the model, one token at a time, while input tokens are processed in parallel. That makes output more expensive to serve, and providers price it accordingly, typically several times the input rate.
Other shortlists
Spending real money on tokens?
Share your workload and current bill. We'll point out routing, caching and model swaps that cut cost without hurting quality.
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