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Proprietary

Which model behind an API is worth the money. Four answers — best value for money, best there is, best with open weights, cheapest that still works.

Which model behind an API is worth the money. 150 measured, 139 of them for sale, and 108 of those stand on two or more of these boards — only those can be picked.

Judged on

Capability is a model's mean percentile across the boards below, on each board's widest metric. Prices are quoted as you are billed them; where a model charges separately to read and to write, the two are ranked against each other at one part in to three parts out, which for this field puts the middle at $5 per million tokens. Best value for money is the most capable at or under that middle, and cheapest is the least expensive of those above the middle for capability — without that second floor the cheapest answer is reliably the worst model in the category. Figures read 2026-10-31.

All the picks