Low-cost AI services suitable for small projects, prototypes, and moderate production use.
Budget LLMs
| Vendor | Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | $100 Gets You |
|---|
| GPT-4o-mini | OpenAI | $0.15 | $0.60 | ~500M tokens |
| Gemini 1.5 Flash | Google | $0.075 | $0.30 | ~1B input |
| Mistral Nemo | Mistral | $0.15 | $0.15 | ~330M tokens |
| Command R | Cohere | $0.50 | $1.50 | ~150M input |
Budget Image AI
| Vendor | Plan | Price | Images/mo |
|---|
| Stable Diffusion API | Pay-per-use | ~$0.01/img | ~10,000 |
| DALL-E 2 | Pay-per-use | ~$0.02/img | ~5,000 |
| Leonardo.ai | Pro | $25/mo | 5,000+ |
| Candy.ai | Starter | $9/mo | Unlimited |
Budget Audio
| Vendor | Service | Price | Value |
|---|
| Whisper API | Transcription | $0.006/min | ~16,000 min |
| Deepgram Nova-2 | Transcription | $0.0043/min | ~23,000 min |
| Google TTS | Standard | $4/1M chars | 25M chars |
| ElevenLabs | Creator | $5/mo | 30k chars |
Typical Budget Stack ($50/mo)
| Service | Plan | Cost | Usage |
|---|
| GPT-4o-mini | API | $20 | 100M tokens |
| Whisper | API | $10 | 1,600 min |
| Embeddings | OpenAI small | $5 | 250M tokens |
| Image Gen | Stable Diffusion | $10 | 1,000 images |
| Total | | $45 | |
Budget Use Cases
| Use Case | Recommended | Monthly Cost |
|---|
| Chatbot | GPT-4o-mini | $5-20 |
| Content summarization | Gemini Flash | $5-15 |
| Transcription | Whisper | $5-30 |
| Simple RAG | Cohere | $10-25 |
| Image generation | SDXL | $10-40 |