Best cheap LLM API for high-volume tasks
When you're calling the API millions of times a month, the per-token rate is the budget. These are our tracked budget-tier models, cheapest input rate first.
High-volume workloads — classification, tagging, moderation, bulk extraction — are usually bottlenecked by unit economics, not raw capability. At millions of calls a month, a fraction of a cent per call compounds fast, and since these tasks typically return a short answer (a label, a category, a boolean) for a much longer prompt, the input rate tends to matter more than the output rate. The models below are our budget-tier picks, sorted by the cheapest input price first.
| Model | Provider | Input /1M | Output /1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral | $0.15 | $0.60 | Not published | |
| Meta (via Together AI) | $0.18 | $0.59 | 1M tokens | |
| OpenAI | $0.20 | $1.20 | ~1.05M tokens | |
| $0.25 | $1.50 | Not published | ||
| Meta (via Together AI) | $0.27 | $0.85 | ~1.05M tokens | |
| DeepSeek | $0.30 | $1.20 | 1M tokens | |
| Amazon | $0.30 | $2.50 | 1M tokens | |
| Alibaba | $0.40 | $1.60 | 1M tokens | |
| Mistral | $0.50 | $1.50 | Not published | |
| Anthropic | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200K tokens | |
| xAI | $1.00 | $2.00 | 256K tokens |
We don't benchmark task-specific quality — this shortlist is built from verified price and published context window only. Use it to narrow candidates by cost, then evaluate output quality yourself.
Frequently asked questions
Most high-volume tasks send a long prompt but return a short answer — a label or a few fields. Since input tokens dominate the bill in that pattern, the input rate is usually what determines your actual cost per call.
Not necessarily. We track verified price and context window only, not task accuracy. If a cheaper model produces enough errors to need manual review, that hidden cost can outweigh the savings — test on a sample of your real data first.
Not always — budget-tier models sometimes ship with smaller context windows than a provider's flagship. Check the context column above if your task involves long input documents, not just short strings.