Cheapest Usable LLM (Best on a Budget)
Sometimes the goal is simply the lowest possible cost per call — for prototypes, internal tools or massive batch jobs. The trick is not going so cheap that quality collapses.
Best value pick
GPT OSS 20B
OpenAI · Overall Arena 1287 · about $8.00/month at 100,000 calls. The top-ranked Claude Opus 5 costs $2,000.00/month — you save $1,992.00/month with GPT OSS 20B.
| 1 | GPT OSS 20B | 1287 | $8.00 | OpenAI |
| 2 | gemma-3-4b-it | 1291 | $10.00 | |
| 3 | Gemma 3 4B IT (Bedrock)Est. | 1291 | $10.00 | AWS Bedrock |
| 4 | GPT OSS 120B | 1366 | $11.80 | OpenAI |
| 5 | Gemma 3 12B IT | 1334 | $12.50 | |
| 6 | Qwen3.5 Flash | 1398 | $18.70 | Alibaba |
| 7 | Gemma 3 27B IT | 1358 | $20.00 | |
| 8 | Amazon Nova Lite | 1298 | $21.00 | AWS Bedrock |
| 9 | GLM-5.3-Flash | 1472 | $23.75 | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) |
| 10 | gpt-oss-20b (Bedrock)Est. | 1287 | $25.50 | AWS Bedrock |
| 11 | Qwen3 30B A3B | 1317 | $26.50 | Alibaba |
| 12 | GPT-5 Nano | 1320 | $27.50 | OpenAI |
Intelligence scores are community Arena ratings from LMArena / arena.ai, used under CC BY 4.0. Snapshot last refreshed 18 September 2026. Scores are a relative signal, not an absolute measure of capability. A Measured score was voted on directly; an Estimated score is inherited from an identical base model (a regional/creator-prefixed hosting duplicate). See our methodology.
Why picking isn’t obvious
We set a generous quality bar (a model just has to be within 15% of the top) and then sort purely by price, so you get the cheapest option that's still competent rather than the cheapest option outright.
FAQ
What is the best value LLM for this?
GPT OSS 20B is the cheapest model that still clears our quality bar for this task, at about $8.00/month for 100,000 calls (1,500 in / 500 out). It scores 1287 on the Overall Arena.
Is the most expensive model worth it for this?
Claude Opus 5 tops the Overall Arena but costs about $2,000.00/month here — roughly $1,992.00/month more than GPT OSS 20B for 218 extra Arena points. For most workloads that gap is not worth the premium.
Cite / link to this page
You’re welcome to reference this page and its figures with attribution and a link back.
https://aicalculatorpro.com/best-llm-for/budget-cheapest/<a href="https://aicalculatorpro.com/best-llm-for/budget-cheapest/">Cheapest Usable LLM (Best on a Budget) — AI Calculator Pro</a>