Cheapest LLMs by Price per Token
The cheapest LLMs are the large language models with the lowest API cost per token. Pricing is quoted per million (1M) tokens, with output tokens usually costing more than input. The table below ranks models from lowest to highest output price — a good starting point for high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads where you can trade some quality for price.
Ranked list (top 25)
| # | Model | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DeepSeek-OCR NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.03 | $0.03 | 8K |
| 2 | deepseek/deepseek-ocr-2 NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.03 | $0.03 | 8K |
| 3 | baichuan-m2-32b NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.07 | $0.07 | 131K |
| 4 | DeepSeek R1 0528 Qwen3 8B NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.06 | $0.09 | 128K |
| 5 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B Helicone | $0.03 | $0.13 | 128K |
| 6 | AutoGLM-Phone-9B-Multilingual NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.14 | 66K |
| 7 | Amazon Nova Micro 1.0 NanoGPT | $0.04 | $0.14 | 128K |
| 8 | Amazon: Nova Micro 1.0 Kilo Gateway | $0.04 | $0.14 | 128K |
| 9 | Amazon: Nova Micro 1.0 Amazon | $0.04 | $0.14 | 128K |
| 10 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B FastRouterOpen weights | $0.03 | $0.14 | 131K |
| 11 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B Alibaba (China) | $0.07 | $0.14 | 33K |
| 12 | Arcee AI: Trinity Mini Arcee AI | $0.05 | $0.15 | 131K |
| 13 | Arcee AI: Trinity Mini Kilo GatewayOpen weights | $0.05 | $0.15 | 131K |
| 14 | Cohere: Command R7B (12-2024) Kilo GatewayOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.15 | 128K |
| 15 | Cohere: Command R7B (12-2024) CohereOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.15 | 128K |
| 16 | Command R7B OpenRouterOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.15 | 128K |
| 17 | Command R7B Merge GatewayOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.15 | 128K |
| 18 | Command R7B Arabic CohereOpen weights | $0.04 | $0.15 | 128K |
| 19 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B NovitaAIOpen weights | $0.15 | $0.15 | 33K |
| 20 | Baichuan 4 Air NanoGPT | $0.16 | $0.16 | 33K |
| 21 | Arcee AI: Spotlight Kilo GatewayOpen weights | $0.18 | $0.18 | 131K |
| 22 | DeepSeek V4 Flash OpenRouterOpen weights | $0.09 | $0.18 | 1M |
| 23 | ByteDance: UI-TARS 7B ByteDance | $0.10 | $0.20 | 128K |
| 24 | ByteDance: UI-TARS 7B Kilo Gateway | $0.10 | $0.20 | 128K |
| 25 | Coding MiniMax M2.7 AIHubMixOpen weights | $0.20 | $0.20 | 205K |
Prices are per 1M tokens (USD); confirm with the provider. Updated regularly.