Modelos IA más baratos — Mejor $/M tokens en 2026
Los modelos IA más baratos por millón de tokens en 2026, clasificados por precio (entrada + salida ponderados). Enrutamiento al costo del proveedor de OrcaRouter, cero margen.
Top cheap models (quality-adjusted)
Ordered by MMLU-Pro / $1 spent. Lower-quality models that need 5× the tokens to produce a usable answer rank LOWER than mid-tier models that solve the task in one shot.
- gemini-3.1-flash — $0.10 / $0.40 per 1M (in / out). MMLU-Pro 78. Best $/quality at the cheap end — ~10× cheaper than gpt-5.5 at ~85% of the quality.
- claude-haiku-4-5 — $0.20 / $1.00 per 1M. MMLU-Pro 76. Anthropic's cheap tier; better at instruction-following than gemini-flash, slightly weaker on math.
- gpt-5.5-mini — $0.15 / $0.60 per 1M. MMLU-Pro 80. OpenAI's cheap-fast tier; balanced. Strong default for 'just run something cheap' use cases.
- deepseek-v4-pro — $0.27 / $1.10 per 1M. MMLU-Pro 84. Cheapest model that crosses the GPT-4-equivalent quality bar. Open-weights so price floor is hardware-bounded.
- qwen3.6-plus — $0.30 / $1.20 per 1M. MMLU-Pro 82. Best multilingual quality at this price point; competitive with Western frontier models on Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
- gemini-3.1-flash-8b — $0.04 / $0.15 per 1M. MMLU-Pro 65. Cheapest model on this list. Use only for high-volume classification, embeddings, or lightweight extraction.
Why cheapest ≠ best value
A model that costs $0.04 per million but takes 5 retries to produce a correct answer ends up at $0.20 per task. A model that costs $0.20 per million but nails it in one shot ends up at $0.20 per task with much lower latency. The right metric is dollars-per-completed-task, not dollars-per-token. The ranking above weights MMLU-Pro accuracy heavily because it correlates with one-shot success rate on real workloads.
OrcaRouter routing for cost
OrcaRouter automatically routes each request to the cheapest live backend serving the requested model. If you call gpt-5.5-mini and OpenAI is mid-incident, OrcaRouter retries against the next-cheapest provider serving that model — so your cost stays at the OpenAI rate during normal operations and degrades gracefully (still cheap, slightly different model) during outages.