AI Architect

Say what you need to do and how often. The page prices it on every model that fits and shows the cheapest in each size class, so you know which to test first. It starts from list prices only; the estimator shows the formula behind each figure.

What do you need?

Task

Summarize a documentOne pass over a long document, for example about 20 pages, into a short summary.Customer support chatA back-and-forth chat. Each turn sends the system prompt and every earlier message again, so input grows with every turn.Draft an emailA short prompt in, a drafted email out.Code assistant sessionA working session of separate requests, each with some code as context.Document Q&A (retrieval)A question answered from passages looked up in your own documents and pasted into the prompt.

Documents per month

Smallest model size class that will do

Size classes group models by price band. They are not a quality ranking: try the cheapest models on your own examples.

Open-weight models only (you may run them yourself)Results can wait hours (batch processing)

Currency

Where to start

The lowest list price for 1,000 documents a month is DeepSeek V4 Flash (DeepSeek) at $1.33 a month.

Cheapest model in each size class
Size class	Model	Per month (USD)	Last verified	Price page
Small	DeepSeek V4 Flash DeepSeek	$1.33	2026-11-03	Vendor price page
Mid	Llama 3.3 70B Instruct Meta	$1.55	2026-11-03	Vendor price page
Frontier	DeepSeek V4 Pro DeepSeek	$23.47	2026-11-03	Vendor price page

See every model with the formula

Prices as of 2026-11-03, list prices before discounts. Not included: taxes, support plans, tool charges, fine-tuning, and the cost of running open-weight models yourself (what is left out).