The right AI for the job. Measured, not guessed.

Independent, hands-on evaluation: benchmarks, live pricing, and self-hosting tradeoffs weighed in practice, so you know when the frontier model earns its cost, when a lighter system is enough, and when not to use AI at all.

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Price / 1M tokensbest available pricing

Claude Fable 5$10/$50PremiumClaude Opus 4.6$5/$25Claude Opus 5$5/$25Claude Sonnet 4.6$3/$15Gemini 3.0 Pro$2/$12Gemini 3.5 Flash$2/$9Grok 4.20$1/$3Claude Haiku 4.5$1/$5K2.6$0.57/$2Gemini 3.0 Flash$0.50/$3GPT-5.1$0.25/$2v3$0.20/$0.80Qwen 3 30B A3B$0.10/$0.30Qwen 3.5 9B$0.10/$0.15V4$0.09/$0.19Best valueMicrosoft Phi-4$0.07/$0.14Claude Fable 5$10/$50PremiumClaude Opus 4.6$5/$25Claude Opus 5$5/$25Claude Sonnet 4.6$3/$15Gemini 3.0 Pro$2/$12Gemini 3.5 Flash$2/$9Grok 4.20$1/$3Claude Haiku 4.5$1/$5K2.6$0.57/$2Gemini 3.0 Flash$0.50/$3GPT-5.1$0.25/$2v3$0.20/$0.80Qwen 3 30B A3B$0.10/$0.30Qwen 3.5 9B$0.10/$0.15V4$0.09/$0.19Best valueMicrosoft Phi-4$0.07/$0.14

Live data

Cost vs. quality across 15 benchmarks

Pick a benchmark below. Models on the dashed line are Pareto-optimal: no other model offers better performance for less money.

176 models compared50 = baseline, 100 = top 5%, 100+ = frontier; higher coverage yields higher confidence

AnthropicCohereDeepSeekGoogleMetaMicrosoftMiniMaxMistralMoonshotnvidiaOpenAIQwenthinking-machinesxAIZhipu

Browse all models Compare API pricing View benchmark atlas

The promise

Spend where it changes the outcome. Not on the smallest model by default, not on the biggest.

Original Work

Tested first-hand, not just aggregated.

All evaluations

NEWMAR 26, 2026Analysis

We Benchmarked 7 OCR Models So You Don't Have To

Results from our own olmOCR-bench runs across OCR-specific models, general-purpose VLMs, and Tesseract. The main lesson: evaluation methodology changes scores more than most leaderboard readers realize.

14 min read

JAN 18, 2026Commentary

Claude Code is the New Cursor (and the Cycle Never Ends)

Everyone's screaming about Claude Code. A year ago, they screamed about Cursor. Before that, Copilot. The pattern is more interesting than the product, and reveals something uncomfortable about how we adopt tools.

12 min read

JAN 17, 2026Guide

When to Build Your Own AI Agent (and When Claude Code Is Enough)

When should you build your own AI agent instead of using Claude Code? A practical guide to the Anthropic Agent SDK, with mental models for understanding when and why to go beyond interactive AI.

17 min read

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