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17 budget AI coding models ranked by output price ($0.28–$5.00/1M), SWE-bench Pro scores, and real-world CodingFleet speed. DeepSeek V4 Flash cheapest ($0.28). MiniMax M3 best open-weight (59.0% Pro). GPT-5.4 Mini fastest (439.8 char/s). Complete value-per-dollar analysis.
A heavy AI coding user burning 200M output tokens/month on GPT-5.5 pays $6,000/month. The same workload on DeepSeek V4 Pro costs $174. The benchmarks gap? 3.2 points on SWE-bench Pro. Here's how to build a coding stack that gives you 95% of flagship performance for 3% of the cost.