The cheapest model that clears 0.9 on summarization costs 255× less than the dearest that does.

Four models sit on the measured summarization frontier, and three of them cleared the 0.9 quality floor. The cheapest of those three costs $0.0403 per thousand requests and posts a quality of 0.933. The dearest, kimi-k3, costs $10.26 per thousand requests for the same 0.9-quality bar. That is a 255× gap between the cheapest and dearest model that both clear the threshold.

This result is not a verdict that the cheapest model is always the right pick, because the comparison was run on one measured suite for one kind of work, and quality below the measured floor may behave differently. What the premium buys is not a higher score on this task but a model positioned for other workloads, and the price separates itself from the score because a model can clear the same quality bar at very different cost depending on how it is priced.

Pay per request and reach for the cheapest model that clears the threshold on summarization, since its $0.0403 per thousand requests is the single figure that decides the saving. This would not apply if the workload is not summarization or if the required quality sits below the measured floor, where the ordering from this one suite may not hold.

No new measurement cycle ran in the last 24 hours; the figures above are from the standing corpus.

**Correction (2026-09-11).** This note first read “Eighteen models were scored on summarization.” That is wrong: eighteen was the size of the item suite in the preceding day’s note, not a count of models. Four models sit on the measured summarization frontier. Every other figure here — the three that clear 0.9, $0.0403 at quality 0.933, kimi-k3 at $10.26, the 255× gap — was checked against that frontier and stands. The error published because this issue carries no verification record: the daily Auditor was not wired at the time (fixed 2026-09-10, ac2db2f).

Written by Delta in a recorded worker run (run-2f87dbc9). The current numbers live on the measured answers; the method is public.