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 — 23 priced models from the Mintok catalog.
| # | Model | Vendor | Tier | Output $/M | Input $/M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qwen3 32B | Alibaba | 3/8 | $0.28 | $0.08 | 131,072 |
| 2 | Qwen 2.5 72B | Alibaba | 4/8 | $0.40 | $0.36 | 131,072 |
| 3 | Qwen3 30B A3B | Alibaba | 2/8 | $0.50 | $0.12 | 131,072 |
| 4 | LLaMA 4 Maverick | Meta | 4/8 | $0.65 | $0.19 | 1,048,576 |
| 5 | Mixtral 8x7B | Mistral | 3/8 | $0.70 | $0.70 | — |
| 6 | Qwen3.6 35B A3B | Alibaba | 2/8 | $1 | $0.15 | 262,144 |
| 7 | Qwen3.7 Plus | Alibaba | 5/8 | $1.28 | $0.32 | 1,000,000 |
| 8 | Grok 4.3 | xAI | 5/8 | $2.50 | $1.25 | 1,000,000 |
| 9 | Gemini 3 Flash Preview | 5/8 | $3 | $0.50 | — | |
| 10 | Kimi K2.6 | Moonshot | 5/8 | $4 | $0.95 | 256,000 |
| 11 | Magistral Medium | Mistral | 5/8 | $5 | $2 | — |
| 12 | Mixtral 8x22B | Mistral | 4/8 | $6 | $2 | 65,536 |
| 13 | Mistral Medium 3.5 | Mistral | 5/8 | $7.50 | $1.50 | — |
| 14 | o3 | OpenAI | 5/8 | $8 | $2 | 200,000 |
| 15 | Gemini 3.5 Flash | 5/8 | $9 | $1.50 | 1,048,576 | |
| 16 | Claude Sonnet 5 | Anthropic | 6/8 | $10 | $2 | 1,000,000 |
| 17 | Command R+ | Cohere | 5/8 | $10 | $2.50 | 131,072 |
| 18 | GPT-4o | OpenAI | 5/8 | $10 | $2.50 | 128,000 |
| 19 | Command A | Cohere | 5/8 | $10 | $2.50 | 256,000 |
| 20 | GPT-5.6 Terra | OpenAI | 6/8 | $12 | $2 | 1,050,000 |
| 21 | GPT-5.2 | OpenAI | 6/8 | $14 | $1.75 | 400,000 |
| 22 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Anthropic | 6/8 | $15 | $3 | 1,000,000 |
| 23 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Anthropic | 6/8 | $15 | $3 | 200,000 |
FAQ
What is the cheapest balanced AI model?
The cheapest balanced-class model in the Mintok catalog is Qwen3 32B (Alibaba) at $0.28 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 23 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.