I tried a bunch of models, but so far deepseek flash from October is just dirt cheap; and roughly on par with the frontier open weight models.

It’s still somewhat behind closed weight models (I only know Gemini Argon) in that it produces lots of text that is approximately correct —- frontier models seem to be very good at producing concise text that’s very correct.

I pay per token, using an EU hosting provider (melious.ai).

But I can fill in the gaps myself, so for me developing for fun, this is enough.