Best-value balanced AI models
Balanced models are the workhorse tier — strong quality at a fraction of flagship cost. Ranked by price per million output tokens, cheapest first — 14 priced models from the Mintok catalog.
| # | Model | Vendor | Tier | Output $/M | Input $/M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen 2.5 72B | Alibaba | 4/8 | $0.40 | $0.36 | 131,072 |
| 2 | Qwen 3 30B (MoE) | Alibaba | 2/8 | $0.50 | $0.12 | 131,072 |
| 3 | LLaMA 4 Maverick | Meta | 4/8 | $0.80 | $0.20 | 1,048,576 |
| 4 | DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | 5/8 | $0.80 | $0.20 | 131,072 |
| 5 | DeepSeek R1 | DeepSeek | 5/8 | $2.50 | $0.70 | 131,072 |
| 6 | Gemini 2.5 Flash | 5/8 | $2.50 | $0.30 | 1,048,576 | |
| 7 | Grok 4.3 | xAI | 5/8 | $2.50 | $1.25 | 1,048,576 |
| 8 | Mixtral 8x22B | Mistral | 4/8 | $6 | $2 | 65,536 |
| 9 | o3 | OpenAI | 5/8 | $8 | $2 | 200,000 |
| 10 | GPT-4o | OpenAI | 5/8 | $10 | $2.50 | 128,000 |
| 11 | Command R+ | Cohere | 5/8 | $10 | $2.50 | 131,072 |
| 12 | Grok-2 | xAI | 5/8 | $10 | $2 | 131,072 |
| 13 | Claude Sonnet 4 | Anthropic | 6/8 | $15 | $3 | 200,000 |
| 14 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | 6/8 | $15 | $3 | 1,000,000 |
FAQ
What is the cheapest balanced AI model?
The cheapest balanced-class model in the Mintok catalog is Qwen 2.5 72B (Alibaba) at $0.40 per million output tokens.
What is a balanced model?
Balanced models are the workhorse tier — strong quality at a fraction of flagship cost.
How many balanced models does Mintok track?
Mintok tracks 14 priced balanced-class models with live $/M-token pricing.
Prices maintained by Mintok's catalog watchers from public sources. Size class + tiers per methodology. Not investment advice.