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AI Economics, Open weights cost less, same quality
×2.4 gap

At 60% on GPQA Diamond, the cheapest open-weights model costs $0.028 per 1M tokens and the cheapest closed one $0.069.

Cheapest blended price among models with an Epoch AI GPQA Diamond score of 0.60 or more, grouped by whether the weights are published.

Source: Epoch AI, OpenRouter, LiteLLM price map. As of 2026-10-23. Based on 123 data points.

Open against closed weights

Cheapest blended price, per 1M tokens
Do open-weights models cost less at the same quality?$0.01$1.00$10.00Sept 2024May 2025Feb 2026Oct 2026$0.069$0.028
  • Open weights
  • Closed
Log scale: each gridline is a multiple of the one below.
Cheapest model scoring 60% or more on GPQA Diamond, by whether its weights are published.
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Quality data: LMArena (CC BY 4.0), Epoch AI (CC BY 4.0). Prices: OpenRouter, LiteLLM (MIT), provider pages. List prices in US dollars before discounts and taxes; other currencies converted at the European Central Bank reference rate. The figures on these pages are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.