#1
Qwen2.5-Coder-7B
$0.36 / month
32.8K context window with $0.0100 / 1M tokens input and $0.0300 / 1M tokens output per 1M tokens.
RAG cost screen
Cheapest LLM API models for RAG answer workloads
Retrieval-augmented generation can become input-heavy because every answer reads the user question plus retrieved context. This page prices one narrow scenario from the RAG use-case page: 100 question tokens, 2,000 retrieved context tokens, 500 answer tokens, and 10,000 questions per month.
Scenario
The workload being priced
This is a cost and context-window screen. It does not decide answer quality, retrieval quality, or grounding behavior.
Question
100 tokens
A short user request.
Retrieved context
2.0K tokens
The source text that drives most input cost.
Answer
500 tokens
The generated response length.
Volume
10.0K / month
A request-style product workload.
Cost screen
Lowest-cost context-ready chat models
Only priced chat models with at least 2.1K context window are shown. Click a model to inspect source and metadata before production use.
| Model | Context window | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5-Coder-7B | 32.8K | $0.0100 / 1M tokens | $0.0300 / 1M tokens | $0.36 |
| llama3.2-11b-vision-instruct | 131.1K | $0.0150 / 1M tokens | $0.0250 / 1M tokens | $0.44 |
| llama3.2-3b-instruct | 131.1K | $0.0150 / 1M tokens | $0.0250 / 1M tokens | $0.44 |
| Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct | 131.1K | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.52 |
| paddleocr-vl | 16.4K | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.52 |
| Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-Turbo | 131.1K | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.0300 / 1M tokens | $0.57 |
| Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 | 131.1K | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.0400 / 1M tokens | $0.62 |
| llama-3.1-8b-instruct | 16.4K | $0.0200 / 1M tokens | $0.0500 / 1M tokens | $0.67 |
Shortlist
Three models to test first
#2
llama3.2-11b-vision-instruct
$0.44 / month
131.1K context window with $0.0150 / 1M tokens input and $0.0250 / 1M tokens output per 1M tokens.
#3
llama3.2-3b-instruct
$0.44 / month
131.1K context window with $0.0150 / 1M tokens input and $0.0250 / 1M tokens output per 1M tokens.
Change retrieval size before choosing a route
RAG winners can change when retrieved context grows from a short passage to a long document bundle. Use the RAG page to change question, context, answer, and monthly volume before comparing routes.
Caveats
What this page does not decide
This page does not rank retrieval quality, answer grounding, citation behavior, latency, safety behavior, rate limits, prompt caching, discounts, regional pricing, or provider-specific add-on charges. Treat it as a cost-first shortlist, then test your own retrieved passages and confirm final pricing with the provider.