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.
Multimodal
Google Gemma 3 27B
Google Gemma 3 27B is a 27B dense multimodal model supporting text and vision with a 128K context window, 140+ languages, and single-GPU deployment - the most capable open model at its size class.
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.
Llama 4 Maverick
Meta's Llama 4 Maverick packs 400B total parameters into a 128-expert MoE architecture with only 17B active per token, beating GPT-4o on Chatbot Arena while matching DeepSeek V3 on reasoning at half the active parameters.
Llama 4 Scout
Meta's Llama 4 Scout is a 109B-total, 17B-active MoE model with 16 experts and a 10M-token context window - the longest of any open-weight model - with native multimodal support for text and images.
Mistral Large 3
Mistral Large 3 is a 675B-parameter MoE model activating 41B per token with native multimodal support, a 256K context window, and Apache 2.0 licensing - Europe's first frontier-class open-weight model.
