Draft pick for Cheapest summarization: Qwen3.7 Flash at $1.70 per month. Best quality per dollar for a steady stream of summaries: quality 54.0 at $1.70 a month, no cited GPQA Diamond score. Prices from Models.dev. Data last refreshed Oct 14, 2026, 05:43 PM UTC.
Job
Which model is the cheapest way to summarize a steady stream of documents, and what will it cost each month?
The score is quality minus a log of the monthly cost, with a cited GPQA Diamond result when the lab published one. The premium card uses raw quality. If the top pick is already the cheapest model, there is no separate budget card.
Four hundred summaries a day. Each one reads about 3,000 tokens and writes about 400. Nothing is cached.
212 models cleared the bar.303 failed the lab, provider, or specialty bar.3 failed a capability filter.1 listed at $0 were left out.0 had no usable price.
Top pick
Qwen3.7 Flash$1.70 / month
Best quality per dollar for a steady stream of summaries: quality 54.0 at $1.70 a month, no cited GPQA Diamond score.
Score 46.3 · $0.03 input · $0.13 output per 1M · context 1,000,000 · 12 providers
Budget pick
Qwen3.7 Flash is already the lowest monthly bill that cleared the bar.
Premium pick
$600 / month
Highest summary quality if you spend more: quality 79.3 before the bill, GPQA Diamond 96 (openai.com).
Quality 79.3 · $10.00 input · $50.00 output per 1M · context 1,050,000 · 32 providers
A fraction of a cent per summary is the wrong trade for customer-facing copy, for a language the cheap model handles badly, or when you need a cited quality score rather than the lowest bill. The premium card is the cited upgrade.
Models listed at $0 are excluded, because a zero in Models.dev is often a missing price rather than a free model. The reference workload is 400 summaries a day, about 3,000 tokens in and 400 out, with nothing cached.
The three cards follow the inputs. Fit, and who holds each role, stays on the reference workload.
| Caps | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 46.3 | Qwen3.7 Flash | $1.70 | $0.03 | $0.13 | 1,000,000 | 12 | Jul 15, 2026 | |
| 43.1 |  DeepSeek V4 Flash | $6.38 | $0.14 | $0.28 | 1,000,000 | 52 | Apr 24, 2026 | |
| 39.8 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $8.28 | $0.15 | $0.60 | 1,000,000 | 64 | Sep 10, 2026 | |
| 37.2 | Qwen3.8 Flash Next | $9.60 | $0.20 | $0.50 | 262,144 | 5 | Aug 27, 2026 | |
| 34.4 |  Command R7B | $2.07 | $0.038 | $0.15 | 128,000 | 6 | Dec 2, 2024 | |
| 33.7 |  GLM-4.7-FlashX | $4.44 | $0.07 | $0.40 | 200,000 | 9 | Jan 19, 2026 | |
| 33.7 | GPT-5.6 Luna | $12.96 | $0.20 | $1.20 | 1,050,000 | 44 | Jul 9, 2026 | |
| 33.1 | GPT OSS 20B | $3.96 | $0.07 | $0.30 | 131,072 | 22 | Aug 5, 2025 | |
| 32.2 | Qwen3.5 9B | $4.32 | $0.10 | $0.15 | 262,144 | 15 | Feb 23, 2026 | |
| 30.5 | GPT OSS 120B | $8.28 | $0.15 | $0.60 | 131,072 | 44 | Aug 5, 2025 | |
| 29.4 |  Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | $5.52 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,048,576 | 20 | Jun 17, 2025 | |
| 29.3 | Qwen3.5 Flash | $5.52 | $0.10 | $0.40 | 1,000,000 | 9 | Feb 23, 2026 |
