Which AI model should I choose: deciding by price, context and quality

In short: Three questions decide the model: how hard is the task, how long is the input, and what are you willing to pay per million tokens. As of October 30, 2026, the cheapest general model on the Wiozen API is wiozen-anthropic ($0.05 input, $0.20 output) and the strongest is claude-opus-5-5 ($2.80 input, $14.00 output). For most work, starting with a cheap model and moving only the tasks you're unhappy with to a stronger one costs less than picking the expensive model from day one.

Which chat models are there, and what do they cost?

These are the catalog prices shown on the Models page on October 30, 2026, and they can change. The page lists only models you can call right now. If you put a name that isn't on the list in a request, the API returns 400 and the error message lists every available name. You can get the same list without a key:

curl https://api.wiozen.com/v1/models

Which model is best for starting cheap?

wiozen-anthropic has the lowest output price on the list. It's a good starting point for chatbots, summaries, email drafts, classification and everyday coding help, and its 200K context is enough for most conversations and mid-sized files. If you use Claude Code, the choice is made for you: Claude Code currently works only with this model.

In jobs that send many short requests (writing product descriptions, labeling thousands of rows) the price gap grows fast. 10 million output tokens cost $2 on wiozen-anthropic and $70 on claude-sonnet-5-5.

Sonnet or Opus for hard tasks?

For multi-step code changes, following a long plan without losing track, or reading a subtle legal text, the most capable options on the list are the Claude 5.5 models. claude-sonnet-5-5 costs half of Opus; try Sonnet first and rerun the task on Opus only if the result falls short.

These models work directly with Cline, Cursor, Roo Code and the Anthropic or OpenAI SDKs. We cover which format to call them with in Messages or Chat Completions.

Which model for long documents?

Input that doesn't fit in 200K needs a 1M-context model: the three Claude 5.5 models, gemini-3.8-flash-high and deepseek-v4.1-flash. DeepSeek and Haiku are the cheapest per token among them. On Haiku, once a request goes over 100K input tokens its price goes up five times, so for very long documents DeepSeek or Gemini stays cheaper. More on this in what is a context window.

Why are overnight batch jobs cheaper on DeepSeek?

deepseek-v4.1-flash is priced by the hour. On weekdays, 04:00–07:00 and 09:00–13:00 Turkey time (UTC+3) are peak hours at the normal price. Every other hour, and all weekend, both input and output are half price. The charge follows the time the request arrives, so moving a batch job to the evening or the weekend gets the same work done at half the price. The Models page shows which price is active right now and when the next switch happens.

What does the status badge on the Models page tell me?

The badge next to each model is calculated from the requests that model received in the last hour:

• working: requests came in during the last hour and none ended in a server-side error.
• partial error: some requests ended in a server-side error (5xx), but at least as many succeeded.
• failing: more requests ended in 5xx than succeeded. Moving your work to another model for a while makes sense.
• live: the model got no requests in the last hour. That isn't a warning sign; without data the page simply doesn't claim "working".

Your own failed requests (wrong key, not enough balance, a malformed body, all 4xx errors) don't affect the badge. Only server-side errors count.

Frequently asked questions

See current prices and status badges on the Models page.

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