Mistral Small 4 is the cheapest at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens — 92% cheaper on input and 97% cheaper on output. For a model with similar capabilities, DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.435/$0.87 offers the best balance of quality and cost savings (65% cheaper).

DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $0.435 input / $0.87 output per million tokens, compared to Gemini 3.1 Pro's $1.25/$10. That's 65% cheaper on input and 91% cheaper on output. For a typical workload of 1M input + 500K output tokens per month, you'd save approximately $38,820 per year.

GPT-5 mini at $0.25/$2.00 per million tokens is 80% cheaper on input and 80% cheaper on output than Gemini 3.1 Pro. It offers 272K context and strong performance for most tasks. For teams already in the OpenAI ecosystem, it's a natural fit at a much lower price point.

Mostly yes. Most alternative providers offer OpenAI-compatible APIs, so switching often requires just changing the API endpoint and key. DeepSeek, Together (Llama), and several others support the OpenAI API format directly.

For coding tasks, DeepSeek V4 Pro ($0.435/$0.87) offers strong performance at 65% less cost. GPT-5 mini ($0.25/$2.00) is also excellent for code and 80% cheaper. For budget coding, Mistral Small 4 ($0.15/$0.60) handles most coding tasks well.