Cheapest AI model beats mid-tier rivals costing up to 14x more, analysis finds

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A developer benchmarking AI models on their API plan found that MiMo-V2.5, priced at $0.14 per million input tokens, outperformed several mid-range models costing between $1.20 and $2.00 on coding tasks. While MiMo-V2.5 lost all four benchmarks — coding, reasoning, math, and bug-fixing — to the pricier DeepSeek v4 Flash at $0.44, it beat competitors like Qwen3.6 Plus and GLM-5.1 on coding scores despite their significantly higher costs. MiMo-V2.5 also offered around 30,100 requests per five-hour window, compared to as few as 880 for some higher-priced rivals. The analysis highlights that the reasoning gap between cheap and premium models remains significant, with a 27% difference that can meaningfully affect performance on complex tasks. The key takeaway is that mid-tier models are charging a premium for benchmark scores they do not actually hold over the cheapest options available.

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