Best AI model for sorting and tagging.
Prices checked
gpt-oss-20b at TrustedRouter costs you 4¢ per 10,000 items, the cheapest of 274 models that can do this job, checked .
Cheapest 10
all 392 models- 1
gpt-oss-20b
Resells
TrustedRouter · $0.01 in · $0.05 out4¢per 10,000 items - 2
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct
Runs it themselves
Inference · $0.02 in · $0.02 out6.4¢per 10,000 items - 3
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Runs it themselves
Helicone · $0.02 in · $0.03 out6.6¢per 10,000 items - 4
Granite 4.0 H Micro
Same as maker
Cloudflare Workers AI · $0.02 in · $0.11 out7.3¢per 10,000 items - 5
Mistral Nemo
Lower precision (fp8)
Eden AI · $0.02 in · $0.03 out7.5¢per 10,000 items - 6
Qwen3.7 Flash
Regional priceEden AI · $0.02 in · $0.08 out7.5¢per 10,000 items - 7
Ling 3.0 Flash
Same as maker
OpenRouter · $0.02 in · $0.06 out7.6¢per 10,000 items - 8
Nex N2.5 Mini
Same as makerOpenRouter · $0.03 in · $0.10 out9.5¢per 10,000 items - 9
Qwen Flash
Regional price
Alibaba Cloud (China) · $0.02 in · $0.22 out$0.11per 10,000 items - 10
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
Runs it themselvesEngy · $0.03 in · $0.12 out
$0.11per 10,000 items
Other ways to pick
What matters
- Structured output
- A label from a fixed list, every time. Held to a schema, the answer needs no parsing and no retry when the model gets chatty.
- Volume is the point
- This is priced per 10,000 items rather than per 1,000, because that is the scale at which people run it, and where a fraction of a cent starts to matter.
- Small models do this well
- Sorting is the job where the cheapest models hold up best against the expensive ones. Start at the top of this list, not the bottom.
How we count
Tickets into queues, reviews into sentiments, products into categories. Each call is tiny and there are an enormous number of them, so the price per million tokens is the whole story. We count only models with 8k of context or more and structured output, and 274 of the 392 we track qualify. The cheapest of them costs 4¢ per 10,000 items at TrustedRouter. They are ranked by what the work costs, not by the price per million tokens, because a model that is cheap to prompt and dear to answer looks different once you know the shape of the job.
An item is about 300 tokens in and 20 out. A cost per 10,000 items is that multiplied out at the row's own input and output rate, so it says what the work costs; the price per million tokens under each name says what the model costs.
A price below the maker's is listed only when the provider says why.
- Resells
- The provider sells another company's endpoint, at a margin of its own or at the maker's price.
- Runs it themselves
- The provider runs the open weights on hardware of its own, so the price is its own rather than a resale.
- Same as maker
- Sold by someone else at the price the maker charges.
- Lower precision
- The open weights, served at a lower precision than the maker's, so not quite the same product.
- Regional price
- A price list for one region, lower than the international one. A region, not a deal.
Frequently asked
- What is the cheapest model for sorting and tagging?
- gpt-oss-20b at TrustedRouter, 4¢ per 10,000 items at $0.01 in and $0.05 out per million tokens, read on 31 Oct 2026.
- How is the cost per unit worked out?
- An item is about 300 tokens in and 20 out. Multiply that by 10,000 and price it at each row's own input and output rate. Nothing else is counted: no cache discount, no batch rate, no free tier.
- Why do only 274 models qualify?
- The job needs 8k of context or more, structured output. Models that fall short are still in the index, they just cannot do this job as described.
- How current are these prices?
- Prices are read every 3 days from 237 providers' public catalogs and this ranking recomputes with them. Last refresh: 31 Oct 2026.