Cheapest Chat API Models
As of October 21, 2026, among LiteLLM's active models with a 32K-token context window or more, offered by at least two providers or by their own lab, the cheapest of the chat models is Qwen2.5 Coder 3B Instruct, at $0.015 per 1M tokens (blended), from Nscale.
Top 20
Sorted by blended price: 3 input tokens for every output token, at each model's headline price (its own lab's API where it sells it, otherwise its cheapest provider). Only active models with a 32K-token context window or more, offered by at least two providers or by their own lab. Free models are left out.
| # | Model | Lab | Blended price per 1M tokens | Price per 1M (in / out) | Context | Providers | Price from |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen2.5 Coder 3B Instruct | Alibaba | $0.015 | $0.01 / $0.03 | 32K | 2 | Nscale |
| 2 | Qwen2.5 Coder 7B | Alibaba | $0.015 | $0.01 / $0.03 | 32K | 3 | Nebius AI Studio |
| 3 | Qwen2.5 Coder 7B Instruct | Alibaba | $0.015 | $0.01 / $0.03 | 32K | 2 | Nscale |
| 4 | Llama3.2 11B Vision Instruct | Meta | $0.0175 | $0.015 / $0.025 | 128K | 5 | Lambda |
| 5 | Llama3.2 3B Instruct | Meta | $0.0175 | $0.015 / $0.025 | 128K | 8 | Lambda |
| 6 | Llama 3.2 1B Instruct | Meta | $0.02 | $0.02 / $0.02 | 131K | 5 | Novita AI |
| 7 | Mistral Nemo Instruct | Mistral AI | $0.02175 | $0.019 / $0.03 | 128K | 5 | DeepInfra |
| 8 | DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B | DeepSeek | $0.025 | $0.025 / $0.025 | 128K | 2 | Nscale |
| 9 | Llama 3.1 8B Instruct Turbo | Meta | $0.025 | $0.02 / $0.04 | 128K | 2 | DeepInfra |
| 10 | GPT OSS 20B | OpenAI | $0.02838 | $0.0145 / $0.07 | 128K | 16 | Darkbloom |
| 11 | Qwen2 VL 7B Instruct | Alibaba | $0.03 | $0.02 / $0.06 | 128K | 2 | Nebius AI Studio |
| 12 | Llama 3.1 8B | Meta | $0.035 | $0.03 / $0.05 | 128K | 5 | LlamaGate |
| 13 | Llama 3.2 3B | Meta | $0.05 | $0.04 / $0.08 | 128K | 3 | LlamaGate |
| 14 | Qwen2.5 7B Instruct | Alibaba | $0.055 | $0.04 / $0.10 | 32K | 3 | DeepInfra |
| 15 | Llama Guard 3 8B | Meta | $0.055 | $0.055 / $0.055 | 128K | 5 | DeepInfra |
| 16 | Mistral Small 24B Instruct | Mistral AI | $0.0575 | $0.05 / $0.08 | 32K | 3 | DeepInfra |
| 17 | Nova Micro | Amazon | $0.06125 | $0.035 / $0.14 | 128K | 2 | Amazon Bedrock |
| 18 | Nova Micro V1 | Amazon | $0.06125 | $0.035 / $0.14 | 128K | 1 | Amazon Nova |
| 19 | Gemma 3 12B IT | $0.0625 | $0.05 / $0.10 | 128K | 4 | Novita AI | |
| 20 | GPT OSS 120B | OpenAI | $0.065 | $0.03 / $0.17 | 131K | 24 | Weights & Biases |