Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite
Google's cheapest Gemini model pairs a 1M-token context window with $0.10/$0.40 per million token pricing, multimodal input, and 359 tokens/second throughput for high-volume production workloads.
Budget
GPT-4o mini
OpenAI's budget API workhorse pairs 128K context with $0.15/$0.60 per million token pricing, solid coding benchmarks, and the broadest third-party ecosystem of any small model.