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 120B
OpenAI · Overall Arena 1365 · about $3.35/month at 100,000 calls. The top-ranked Gemini 4 Argon costs $800.00/month — you save $796.65/month with GPT OSS 120B.
| 1 | GPT OSS 120B | 1365 | $3.35 | OpenAI |
| 2 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1465 | $10.50 | DeepSeek |
| 3 | Gemma 3 12B IT | 1334 | $12.00 | |
| 4 | nvidia-nemotron-3-nano-30b-a3b | 1348 | $17.50 | Nvidia |
| 5 | Gemma 3 27B IT | 1358 | $20.00 | |
| 6 | Qwen3.8 27B | 1438 | $22.75 | Alibaba |
| 7 | Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite | 1330 | $26.25 | |
| 8 | Qwen3 30B A3B | 1317 | $26.50 | Alibaba |
| 9 | GPT-5 Nano | 1320 | $27.50 | OpenAI |
| 10 | Google Gemma 3 12B (Bedrock)Est. | 1334 | $28.00 | AWS Bedrock |
| 11 | GLM-4.7-Flash | 1351 | $29.00 | Z.ai (Zhipu AI) |
| 12 | Step 3.5 Flash | 1403 | $30.00 | StepFun |
Intelligence scores are community Arena ratings from LMArena / arena.ai, used under CC BY 4.0. Snapshot last refreshed 2 November 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 120B is the cheapest model that still clears our quality bar for this task, at about $3.35/month for 100,000 calls (1,500 in / 500 out). It scores 1365 on the Overall Arena.
Is the most expensive model worth it for this?
Gemini 4 Argon tops the Overall Arena but costs about $800.00/month here — roughly $796.65/month more than GPT OSS 120B for 164 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>