Frontier AI Model Matrix
Intelligence, Speed & Pricing
Real-time pricing, empirical speed benchmarks, and provider failover across 59 frontier AI models.
Intelligence Updated
Speed
Cost per Task
Find Your Pareto-Optimal Model (3-Click Architecture Wizard)
Don't spend hours comparing 52 model cards. Select your application workload, performance constraints, and monthly budget to get an audited primary recommendation, failover fallback, and verified code SDK snippet in 3 seconds.
AI & Cloud Reality Checks: Architecture Economics & Traps
Shocking billing traps, token hyper-deflation, and counter-intuitive infrastructure truths verified in production telemetry.
The 70-Character SMS Overhead Trap
2.3x Bill JumpHidden Reasoning Token Overages
25,000 Hidden TokensAWS S3 $0.09 Egress Lock-in
$0.09/GB Exit Fee99.5% Token Hyper-Deflation
-99.5% in 36 MosThe 1-Character Google Places Trap
12x Bill Spike⏳ The 5-Min Cache Eviction Penalty
1.25x Write SurchargeRoast My AI Architecture & Unit Economics
Pick your stack and let CheckAPICost brutally roast your cloud bills with 100% grounded arithmetic.
"Your CFO is currently weeping in the server room."
You are burning frontier model tokens on simple JSON extraction, streaming video out of AWS S3 at $0.09/GB, and putting dynamic timestamps at the top of your prompts to guarantee 0% cache hits. You aren't building a SaaS; you are running a charitable foundation for Jensen Huang and Andy Jassy.
1v1 Model VS Battle: Empirical Delta & Arbitrage
← Select two models above to generate an empirical verdict & cost arbitrage analysis.
Foundation Models Intelligence & Price Index
↗CheckAPICost Intelligence Index incorporates 10 empirical evaluations: Chatbot Arena Elo, SWE-bench Verified coding, MMLU-Pro, MATH-500, HumanEval, and live latency telemetry.
| Model Name ⇵ | Tier ⇵ | Input / 1M ⇵ | Output / 1M ⇵ | Cached Input ⇵ | Speed (t/s) ⇵ | Context ⇵ | Intelligence Score ⇵ | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
GPT-6 Astra Pro
|
OpenAI Frontier Supercluster | $10.00 | $50.00 | $2.500 | 60 t/s | 1.05M |
98
|
|
|
Claude Opus 5
|
Anthropic Flagship Titan | $2.50 | $12.50 | $0.250 | 65 t/s | 1M |
97
|
|
|
GPT-6 Astra
|
OpenAI Autonomous Flagship | $10.00 | $50.00 | $2.500 | 85 t/s | 1.05M |
95
|
|
|
Claude Sonnet 5
|
Next-Gen Code & Agent Architecture | $2.00 | $10.00 | $0.200 | 90 t/s | 1M |
94
|
|
|
Claude Fable 5
|
Frontier Agentic World Modeler | $10.00 | $50.00 | $2.500 | 75 t/s | 1M |
92
|
|
|
Grok 4.6 (xAI)
|
Colossus Scale Frontier Titan | $2.00 | $6.00 | $0.500 | 120 t/s | 500K |
91
|
|
|
Grok 3 (xAI)
|
Colossus Compute Leader | $3.00 | $15.00 | $0.750 | 90 t/s | 131K |
88
|
|
|
Claude 3.7 Sonnet
|
Hybrid Reasoning Flagship | $3.00 | $15.00 | $0.300 | 75 t/s | 200K |
86
|
|
|
GPT-4.5 Preview
|
Massive Dense Flagship | $75.00 | $150.00 | $37.500 | 45 t/s | 128K |
85
|
|
|
o1 Heavyweight
|
Deep Deliberative Reasoning | $15.00 | $60.00 | $7.500 | 35 t/s | 200K |
84
|
|
|
Gemini 3.1 Pro
|
Google Flagship Multimodal (2M Ctx) | $1.25 | $5.00 | $0.312 | 110 t/s | 2M |
83
|
|
|
DeepSeek R1
|
Open Reasoning MoE (671B) | $0.55 | $2.19 | $0.140 | 65 t/s | 64K |
81
|
|
|
Gemini 3.8 Flash
|
Ultra-Low Latency Multimodal Core | $0.15 | $0.60 | $0.038 | 280 t/s | 1M |
80
|
|
|
Qwen 2.5 Max
|
Flagship Foundation MoE | $1.60 | $6.40 | $0.400 | 110 t/s | 128K |
79
|
|
|
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
|
Industry Benchmark Standard | $3.00 | $15.00 | $0.300 | 82 t/s | 200K |
79
|
|
|
Gemini 3.7 Flash
|
Hybrid Reasoning & Tooling Engine | $0.12 | $0.48 | $0.030 | 230 t/s | 1M |
78
|
|
|
Grok 3 Mini (Thinking)
|
Fast Reasoning Engine | $0.30 | $1.20 | $0.075 | 190 t/s | 131K |
78
|
|
|
Llama 3.1 405B
|
Ultra-Heavy Open Frontier | $2.50 | $5.00 | $2.500 | 45 t/s | 128K |
77
|
|
|
o3-mini
|
High-Efficiency STEM Reasoning | $1.10 | $4.40 | $0.550 | 115 t/s | 200K |
77
|
|
|
Gemini Project Astra
|
Realtime Multimodal Live Vision Agent | $0.10 | $0.40 | $0.025 | 240 t/s | 1M |
76
|
|
|
Kimi k1.5 (Moonshot)
|
Long-Context Reasoning MoE | $1.20 | $3.60 | $0.300 | 85 t/s | 256K |
76
|
|
|
GPT-4o
|
Omni Multimodal Flagship | $2.50 | $10.00 | $1.250 | 95 t/s | 128K |
76
|
|
|
Claude 3 Opus
|
Maximum Depth Classical | $15.00 | $75.00 | $3.750 | 35 t/s | 200K |
76
|
|
|
DeepSeek V3
|
Ultra-Value MoE (671B) | $0.27 | $1.10 | $0.070 | 85 t/s | 64K |
75
|
|
|
QwQ 32B Preview
|
Open Reasoning Specialist | $0.40 | $0.70 | $0.400 | 70 t/s | 32K |
75
|
|
|
Gemini 2.0 Flash
|
Ultra Fast Workhorse | $0.10 | $0.40 | $0.025 | 210 t/s | 1M |
73
|
|
|
DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
|
LPU Fast Reasoning | $0.75 | $0.99 | $0.750 | 280 t/s | 128K |
73
|
|
|
Fable Showrunner
|
Autonomous World Simulator | $1.50 | $6.00 | $0.500 | 110 t/s | 128K |
72
|
|
|
Grok 2
|
General Frontier | $2.00 | $10.00 | $1.000 | 85 t/s | 128K |
72
|
|
|
Pixtral Large 124B
|
Frontier Vision & Multimodal | $2.00 | $6.00 | $2.000 | 65 t/s | 128K |
72
|
|
|
Claude 3.5 Haiku
|
Ultra-Fast Intelligence | $0.80 | $4.00 | $0.080 | 160 t/s | 200K |
72
|
|
|
o1-mini
|
Fast STEM Reasoning | $1.10 | $4.40 | $0.550 | 100 t/s | 128K |
72
|
|
|
Llama 3.3 70B (Groq)
|
Open Enterprise | $0.59 | $0.79 | $0.590 | 380 t/s | 128K |
71
|
|
|
Grok 2 Vision
|
Multimodal Frontier | $2.00 | $10.00 | $1.000 | 75 t/s | 128K |
71
|
|
|
Llama 3.2 90B Vision
|
Open Multimodal Enterprise | $0.90 | $1.20 | $0.900 | 80 t/s | 128K |
71
|
|
|
DeepSeek Coder V2
|
MoE Programming Titan | $0.14 | $0.28 | $0.040 | 75 t/s | 128K |
71
|
|
|
Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B
|
Specialized Polyglot Coder | $0.35 | $0.50 | $0.350 | 140 t/s | 128K |
71
|
|
|
Qwen 2.5 72B
|
Open Frontier Coder | $0.60 | $0.85 | $0.600 | 120 t/s | 128K |
70
|
|
|
Fable Chronicle
|
Emergent Narrative Engine | $2.00 | $8.00 | $0.600 | 95 t/s | 128K |
70
|
|
|
GPT-4 Turbo
|
Enterprise Workhorse | $10.00 | $30.00 | $5.000 | 55 t/s | 128K |
70
|
|
|
Llama 3.1 70B
|
Open Workhorse | $0.50 | $0.70 | $0.500 | 120 t/s | 128K |
69
|
|
|
Command R+ (104B)
|
Enterprise RAG & Tool Master | $2.50 | $10.00 | $2.500 | 75 t/s | 128K |
69
|
|
|
Falcon 2 / Fal.ai
|
Ultra-Fast Generative Core | $0.50 | $1.50 | $0.250 | 260 t/s | 64K |
69
|
|
|
DeepSeek R1 Distill 32B
|
Mid-Weight Reasoning | $0.40 | $0.60 | $0.400 | 140 t/s | 64K |
69
|
|
|
Gemini 1.5 Pro
|
2M Context Pioneer | $1.25 | $5.00 | $0.312 | 80 t/s | 2M |
68
|
|
|
Mistral Large 2
|
Flagship Multilingual | $2.00 | $6.00 | $2.000 | 80 t/s | 128K |
68
|
|
|
Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite
|
Economy Speed Core | $0.07 | $0.30 | $0.018 | 260 t/s | 1M |
68
|
|
|
Phi-4 (14B)
|
Small Model Math Frontier | $0.15 | $0.30 | $0.150 | 130 t/s | 16K |
68
|
|
|
Codestral 22B
|
80+ Language Coder | $0.20 | $0.60 | $0.200 | 130 t/s | 256K |
68
|
|
|
Falcon 180B (TII)
|
Open Heavyweight Core | $1.80 | $1.80 | $1.800 | 35 t/s | 32K |
65
|
|
|
Gemini 1.5 Flash
|
Long-Context Utility | $0.07 | $0.30 | $0.018 | 190 t/s | 1M |
64
|
|
|
Mistral Small 3
|
Compact Workhorse | $0.20 | $0.60 | $0.200 | 160 t/s | 32K |
64
|
|
|
GPT-4o mini
|
Lightweight Utility | $0.15 | $0.60 | $0.075 | 135 t/s | 128K |
62
|
|
|
Command R (35B)
|
Scalable Enterprise Agent | $0.50 | $1.50 | $0.500 | 110 t/s | 128K |
62
|
|
|
Gemma 2 27B
|
Open Google Enterprise | $0.27 | $0.27 | $0.270 | 110 t/s | 8K |
61
|
|
|
Llama 3.2 11B Vision
|
Edge Multimodal Core | $0.15 | $0.20 | $0.150 | 210 t/s | 128K |
60
|
|
|
Llama 3.1 8B (Groq)
|
Voice & Sub-second Speed | $0.05 | $0.08 | $0.050 | 550 t/s | 128K |
56
|
|
|
Claude 3 Haiku
|
High-Speed Utility | $0.25 | $1.25 | $0.050 | 140 t/s | 200K |
52
|
|
|
GPT-3.5 Turbo
|
Legacy Fast Baseline | $0.50 | $1.50 | $0.500 | 120 t/s | 16K |
45
|
Model Duel & Trade-Off Arena
Pit any two frontier models head-to-head in real time. Compare empirical coding intelligence (SWE-bench), reasoning (GPQA Diamond), generation speed, time-to-first-token (TTFT), prompt caching discounts, and live cash-delta savings on your monthly production workload.
Empirical Head-to-Head Benchmark Differential (Normalized side-by-side)
Workload Cost Delta Simulator
Adjust traffic volume and prompt caching to calculate exact monthly cloud budget savings between Contender A and Contender B.
Enterprise LLM Cost Estimator
Simulate exact enterprise cloud spend across foundation models with provider-accurate prompt caching (up to 90% discount) and batch processing (50% discount).
Monthly Spend Comparison
Spatial Prompt Cache Studio & Thermal Decay Engine
Architect and visually reorder your prompt components. In prefix-caching architectures (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek), placing dynamic variables above static prefixes completely invalidates the cache downstream. Simulate traffic arrival frequency (RPM) against Anthropic's 5-minute TTL to discover your break-even point against the 1.25x creation penalty.
Prompt Layer Hierarchy Drag to Reorder
31,550 total tokenscache_control breakpoints.
Live Tokenizer Studio & Prompt Cost Inspector
Paste your raw system prompt, code repository extract, or JSON tool definitions. Instantly calculate exact BPE token counts across OpenAI (o200k/cl100k), Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and Meta Llama 3 tokenizers. See whether your payload qualifies for prompt caching discounts and inspect real-time execution costs across top models.
Multi-Engine Token Counts
Execution Cost for This Exact Payload
| Model | 1 Run (Fresh) | 1 Run (Cached) | 10,000 Calls/Mo |
|---|
Reasoning Token Inflation & CoT De-Anonymizer
Reasoning models (o1, o3-mini, Claude 3.7 Thinking, DeepSeek R1) generate thousands of internal "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) tokens before producing a single word of visible output. Because thinking tokens are billed at full output rates, a 150-word response can cost up to 35x more than advertised rate cards suggest.
Prompt Token Waste Inspector & Lossless Minifier
Developer prompts suffer from "input snowballing"polite boilerplate, repetitive instructions, and bloated JSON schema keys that waste 25% to 45% of every API call. Paste your prompt below to scan for token bloat, strip deadweight, and project instant cloud spend reduction.
3-Year Frontier Token Deflation & Hardware Roadmap
Frontier AI intelligence has experienced an unprecedented deflationary curve. Track historical token pricing collapses across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and DeepSeek, with projected 2027/2028 cost curves driven by Blackwell Ultra-clusters and custom ASIC scaling.
Empirical AI Benchmark Leaderboards
Verified, independent evaluations from Chatbot Arena Elo, SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark, MMLU-Pro multi-subject reasoning, and MATH-500 competition math.
| Rank | Model Name | Provider | Context | Chatbot Arena Elo | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 |
GPT-6 Astra Pro
|
openai | 1.05M |
1448
|
|
| #2 |
Claude Opus 5
|
anthropic | 1M |
1442
|
|
| #3 |
GPT-6 Astra
|
openai | 1.05M |
1435
|
|
| #4 |
Claude Sonnet 5
|
anthropic | 1M |
1430
|
|
| #5 |
Claude Fable 5
|
anthropic | 1M |
1422
|
|
| #6 |
Grok 4.6 (xAI)
|
xai | 500K |
1418
|
|
| #7 |
Grok 3 (xAI)
|
xai | 131K |
1402
|
|
| #8 |
Claude 3.7 Sonnet
|
anthropic | 200K |
1385
|
|
| #9 |
GPT-4.5 Preview
|
openai | 128K |
1380
|
|
| #10 |
o1 Heavyweight
|
openai | 200K |
1375
|
|
| #11 |
Gemini 3.1 Pro
|
2M |
1368
|
||
| #12 |
DeepSeek R1
|
deepseek | 64K |
1355
|
|
| #13 |
Gemini 3.8 Flash
|
1M |
1348
|
||
| #14 |
Gemini 3.7 Flash
|
1M |
1340
|
||
| #15 |
Qwen 2.5 Max
|
alibaba | 128K |
1340
|
|
| #16 |
Gemini Project Astra
|
1M |
1335
|
||
| #17 |
Llama 3.1 405B
|
meta | 128K |
1335
|
|
| #18 |
o3-mini
|
openai | 200K |
1330
|
|
| #19 |
Grok 3 Mini (Thinking)
|
xai | 131K |
1330
|
|
| #20 |
Kimi k1.5 (Moonshot)
|
moonshot | 256K |
1325
|
|
| #21 |
Claude 3.5 Sonnet
|
anthropic | 200K |
1320
|
|
| #22 |
GPT-4o
|
openai | 128K |
1320
|
|
| #23 |
DeepSeek V3
|
deepseek | 64K |
1315
|
|
| #24 |
QwQ 32B Preview
|
alibaba | 32K |
1310
|
|
| #25 |
Claude 3 Opus
|
anthropic | 200K |
1310
|
|
| #26 |
Gemini 2.0 Flash
|
1M |
1305
|
||
| #27 |
Gemini 1.5 Pro
|
2M |
1300
|
||
| #28 |
Fable Showrunner
|
fable | 128K |
1295
|
|
| #29 |
Grok 2
|
xai | 128K |
1295
|
|
| #30 |
Llama 3.3 70B (Groq)
|
meta | 128K |
1290
|
|
| #31 |
Grok 2 Vision
|
xai | 128K |
1290
|
|
| #32 |
DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
|
deepseek | 128K |
1290
|
|
| #33 |
Qwen 2.5 72B
|
alibaba | 128K |
1285
|
|
| #34 |
Pixtral Large 124B
|
mistral | 128K |
1285
|
|
| #35 |
Fable Chronicle
|
fable | 128K |
1280
|
|
| #36 |
Claude 3.5 Haiku
|
anthropic | 200K |
1280
|
|
| #37 |
Llama 3.2 90B Vision
|
meta | 128K |
1280
|
|
| #38 |
DeepSeek Coder V2
|
deepseek | 128K |
1280
|
|
| #39 |
Mistral Large 2
|
mistral | 128K |
1275
|
|
| #40 |
Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B
|
alibaba | 128K |
1275
|
|
| #41 |
o1-mini
|
openai | 128K |
1270
|
|
| #42 |
Llama 3.1 70B
|
meta | 128K |
1270
|
|
| #43 |
Command R+ (104B)
|
cohere | 128K |
1270
|
|
| #44 |
Falcon 2 / Fal.ai
|
fable | 64K |
1265
|
|
| #45 |
Gemini 2.0 Flash-Lite
|
1M |
1260
|
||
| #46 |
GPT-4 Turbo
|
openai | 128K |
1260
|
|
| #47 |
Phi-4 (14B)
|
microsoft | 16K |
1260
|
|
| #48 |
DeepSeek R1 Distill 32B
|
deepseek | 64K |
1260
|
|
| #49 |
Codestral 22B
|
mistral | 256K |
1250
|
|
| #50 |
Gemini 1.5 Flash
|
1M |
1250
|
||
| #51 |
Falcon 180B (TII)
|
fable | 32K |
1240
|
|
| #52 |
GPT-4o mini
|
openai | 128K |
1235
|
|
| #53 |
Mistral Small 3
|
mistral | 32K |
1230
|
|
| #54 |
Command R (35B)
|
cohere | 128K |
1220
|
|
| #55 |
Gemma 2 27B
|
8K |
1220
|
||
| #56 |
Llama 3.2 11B Vision
|
meta | 128K |
1210
|
|
| #57 |
Llama 3.1 8B (Groq)
|
meta | 128K |
1190
|
|
| #58 |
Claude 3 Haiku
|
anthropic | 200K |
1180
|
|
| #59 |
GPT-3.5 Turbo
|
openai | 16K |
1120
|
Open-Weights Inference Hosting Marketplace
Compare identical open-weights models hosted across distinct inference providers. Analyze real throughput (t/s), latency (TTFT), and token pricing across Cerebras, Groq, DeepSeek Native, Together AI, and Fireworks AI.
| Hosting Provider | Output Speed (t/s) | Latency (TTFT) | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context Limit | Hardware / Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cerebras | 1850 t/s | 110 ms | $0.60 | $0.60 | 8K | World Record 1,850 t/s (Wafer Scale Engine 3) |
| Groq | 380 t/s | 160 ms | $0.59 | $0.79 | 128K | Lowest Latency (LPU Tensor Stream) |
| Fireworks AI | 160 t/s | 190 ms | $0.90 | $0.90 | 131K | Speculative Decoding (Optimized vLLM Pods) |
| Together AI | 130 t/s | 240 ms | $0.88 | $0.88 | 131K | 99.9% Enterprise SLA (Dedicated H100 Cluster) |
| Novita AI | 105 t/s | 280 ms | $0.52 | $0.75 | 64K | Budget Serverless (Spot GPU Cloud) |
Self-Hosted GPU vs. Cloud API Break-Even Engine
At what request volume does it become cheaper to rent dedicated NVIDIA H100, A100, or RTX 4090 instances running vLLM or SGLang instead of paying per-token API rates? Discover your financial break-even crossover point factoring in hardware cost, idle capacity overhead, and engineer ops time.
Multi-Provider Failover & Gateway Arbitrage Simulator
Enterprise production architectures cannot rely on a single LLM vendor. Model active-passive circuit breakers, cascading rate-limit fallbacks, and the financial spread between 0% BYOK enterprise gateways and 5.5% aggregated routing surcharges.
Quality vs. Cost: Pareto Frontier
The dashed curve connects the Pareto-Optimal Models delivering the highest intelligence score per dollar spent. Models located below and to the right of this curve are economically dominated by cheaper, smarter alternatives.
Multi-Modal Compound AI Pipeline Composer
Drag, connect, and customize autonomous AI agent workflows (Voice STT → Embeddings → Vector DB → Web Scraper → Reasoning LLM → Guardrails → Voice TTS). The intelligent engine auto-detects graph topology, simulates end-to-end token flow, and computes real-time compound cost and latency.
Select a Node
24-Hour Production Telemetry Replay & Cash-Delta Scrubber
Static token multiplication fails to capture real enterprise costs because workloads fluctuate wildly over 24 hours. Scrub across the 24-hour operational timeline to inspect hourly concurrency spikes, thermal cache expiration during idle hours, and model spend divergences.