Baichuan4-Air

By price, Baichuan4-Air ranks 11th cheapest of 68 on input and 3rd on output. Its quality score of 70 ranks 64th of 68, and on value (quality score ÷ output price) it ranks 6th of 68. Its blended rate sits 95% below the catalog average.

In real billing terms: a support chatbot handling 50,000 turns a month (2,000 input / 500 output tokens each) costs about $17 per month on Baichuan4-Air, while a RAG workload of 20,000 queries (8,000 input / 800 output tokens each) runs about $24. Because output is priced 1.0× input here, long-generation tasks scale cost fastest — cap output length before you optimise anything else.

A 32K context window holds roughly 43 pages of A4 text (at ~750 tokens per page), ranking 65th of 68 here. That is on the smaller side, so long documents need retrieval and chunking rather than raw stuffing. Output runs at about 180 tok/s (11th fastest of 68), fast enough for real-time interaction and high-throughput batches.

We track 2 Baichuan models, and Baichuan4-Air's blended rate sits 98% below that provider's average. If your task tolerates a little less headroom, Phi-4-mini (Microsoft) blends about 82% cheaper at a quality score of 68, and is worth benchmarking first. Going the other way, qwen3.5-flash scores 82 on quality for about 60% less.

The closest model in Baichuan's line-up is Baichuan4 ($13.89 input / $13.89 output, quality 80). Against it, Baichuan4-Air scores 10 points lower on quality, runs 120 tok/s faster (about 200%), costs 10113% less blended. When two models sit this close on price, the deciding factor is usually the quality ceiling — run both against your real prompts before picking.