Cheapest frontier AI, ranked

Grok 4.5's $2/$6 pricing undercuts Opus-class rivals ~60%, GLM-5.2 is the cheapest true frontier tier, and DeepSeek-V3 is cheaper still.

The top 3

  1. Grok 4.5 lit the fuse: Grok 4.5 charges $2 in / $6 out — roughly half of Opus 4.8's $5/$25 and GPT-5.6 Sol's $5/$30.
  2. GLM-5.2: cheapest frontier tier: GLM-5.2 is the cheapest true frontier-class model at $1.4 in / $4.4 out per million tokens on Z.ai's API.
  3. DeepSeek-V3: the budget king: DeepSeek-V3 runs about $0.27 per million input tokens — roughly 7x cheaper on input than Grok 4.5.

Sources

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