Best Cheap LLM in 2026
Active AI models ranked by input price per million tokens. Prices from official provider pages.
Updated automatically as pricing changes. Full model database →
Finding the best value LLM
Price alone doesn't tell the whole story. A model that costs twice as much but solves problems in half the calls is actually cheaper. When evaluating cost, consider:
- Input vs output pricing — for chat and RAG, input is usually 80%+ of your tokens. For generation-heavy tasks (writing, summarization), output price matters more.
- Context window — larger contexts let you process more in a single call, reducing round trips and total token usage.
- Open-weight models — if you can self-host, models like Mistral and LLaMA can cost near zero at scale. Check the “open weights” column on the model database.
- Quality vs cost — compare benchmark scores on the benchmark leaderboard to find the best performance per dollar.
Also see: Best Coding LLM, Best Reasoning LLM, Compare any two models.