Mistral Small 4 is the cheapest at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens — 93% cheaper on input and 97% cheaper on output. For a model with similar quality, DeepSeek V4 Pro at $0.435/$0.87 offers the best balance of capability and cost savings (71% cheaper).

DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $0.435 input / $0.87 output per million tokens, compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash's $1.50/$9. That's 71% cheaper on input and 90% cheaper on output. For a typical workload of 1M input + 500K output tokens per month, you'd save approximately $51,192 per year.

DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens is 91% cheaper on input and 97% cheaper on output. However, it may not match Gemini 3.5 Flash's quality on complex tasks. It's excellent for simpler, high-volume tasks where cost matters most.

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 71% less cost. GPT-5 mini ($0.25/$2.00) is also excellent for code and 83% cheaper. For budget coding, Mistral Small 4 ($0.15/$0.60) handles most coding tasks well.