# Cheap-tier model

**Source:** https://promtable.com/glossary/cheap-tier-model

> A cheap-tier model is the small-fast LLM each major provider ships alongside their frontier model — Claude Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini Flash, Mistral Small, DeepSeek V3 — used for routing, classification, extraction, and bulk inference.

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A cheap-tier model is the small-fast LLM each major provider ships alongside their frontier model — Claude Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, Gemini Flash, Mistral Small, DeepSeek V3 — used for routing, classification, extraction, and bulk inference.

Every major LLM provider in 2026 maintains a cheap-tier model 5-20× cheaper than the frontier tier. Use cases: router LLM that picks the next tool / model, classification + extraction at scale, real-time voice agents where latency matters, bulk content moderation. Quality is materially below frontier on hard reasoning but adequate for narrow tasks. Cost matters: production stacks routing 80% of traffic to cheap-tier and 20% to frontier can cut total cost 5-10× with minimal quality loss when the routing is evaluated and tuned.

## When to use

- Router LLMs.
- Classification + extraction at scale.
- Real-time voice + latency-critical apps.

## Common mistakes

- Routing too much to cheap tier without evals — quality drift goes unnoticed.
- Using cheap tier for hard reasoning — frontier still wins by a wide margin.

## Related terms

- [model-router](https://promtable.com/glossary/model-router)
- [router-llm](https://promtable.com/glossary/router-llm)
- [model-router-policy](https://promtable.com/glossary/model-router-policy)

*Last updated: 2026-06-01*
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Original page: https://promtable.com/glossary/cheap-tier-model
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