Undominated.ai

Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 2.5 Flash

Google LMArena 1417.3 $0.850/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28

2 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 28 score at least as high as Gemini 2.5 Flash and cost no more under at least one workload. 27 of them are genuinely cheaper; the rest match the price and win on score alone. 2 match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. 26 do not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Gemini 2.5 Flash, it is not generated.

Where it holds

WorkloadGemini 2.5 Flash $/MBetter and cheaperWith a trade
Balanced$0.850219
Summarise$0.333114
Chat$1.10224
Code gen$1.60226
Agentic$0.469216

Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

What you would be replacing

Intelligence1417.3
Context window1.0M
Max output66K
Input modesfile, image, text, audio, video
Tool useyes
Extended reasoningyes

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Gemini 2.5 Flash.

Better and cheaper, nothing given up 2

Each of these matches or beats Gemini 2.5 Flash on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

#ModelIntelligence$/MHolds under
1Gemini 3.7 Flash Google1490.2 +72.9$0.750
  • Balanced −12%
  • Chat −20%
  • Code gen −22%
  • Agentic −15%
2Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite Google1436.5 +19.2$0.850
  • Balanced same price
  • Summarise same price
  • Chat same price
  • Code gen same price
  • Agentic same price

Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 26

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

ModelIntelligence$/MHolds underWhat you give up
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi1465 +47.7$0.544
  • Balanced −36%
  • Chat −56%
  • Code gen −59%
  • Agentic −48%
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen1456.2 +38.9$0.560
  • Balanced −34%
  • Summarise −11%
  • Chat −43%
  • Code gen −45%
  • Agentic −34%
  • 1.0M → 1.0M context
  • no file, audio, video input
Gemma 4 31B Google1441.7 +24.4$0.152
  • Balanced −82%
  • Summarise −73%
  • Chat −84%
  • Code gen −85%
  • Agentic −78%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • 66K → 16K max output
  • no file, audio input
Hy3 Tencent1441.2 +23.9$0.144
  • Balanced −83%
  • Summarise −77%
  • Chat −85%
  • Code gen −86%
  • Agentic −82%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Gemma 4 26B A4B Google1434.6 +17.3$0.138
  • Balanced −84%
  • Summarise −75%
  • Chat −84%
  • Code gen −85%
  • Agentic −76%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • 66K → 16K max output
  • no file, audio input
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek1431.6 +14.3$0.101
  • Balanced −88%
  • Summarise −80%
  • Chat −91%
  • Code gen −92%
  • Agentic −88%
  • no file, image, audio, video input
MiniMax M3 MiniMax1434.8 +17.5$0.525
  • Balanced −38%
  • Summarise −17%
  • Chat −46%
  • Code gen −49%
  • Agentic −38%
  • no file, audio input
Qwen3.6 Plus Qwen1436.8 +19.5$0.731
  • Balanced −14%
  • Chat −11%
  • Code gen −19%
  • 1.0M → 1.0M context
  • no file, audio input
GLM 4.7 Z.ai1435.3 +18$0.738
  • Balanced −13%
  • Chat −23%
  • Code gen −26%
  • Agentic −12%
  • 1.0M → 205K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi1427.3 tie$0.175
  • Balanced −79%
  • Summarise −68%
  • Chat −86%
  • Code gen −87%
  • Agentic −83%
  • no file input
GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI1428.5 +11.2$0.450
  • Balanced −47%
  • Summarise −40%
  • Chat −50%
  • Code gen −51%
  • Agentic −48%
  • no audio, video input
DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek1424.6 tie$0.290
  • Balanced −66%
  • Summarise −31%
  • Chat −76%
  • Code gen −80%
  • Agentic −57%
  • 1.0M → 164K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
DeepSeek V3.2 Exp DeepSeek1424.4 tie$0.305
  • Balanced −64%
  • Summarise −17%
  • Chat −70%
  • Code gen −78%
  • Agentic −38%
  • 1.0M → 164K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 Qwen1419.3 tie$0.205
  • Balanced −76%
  • Summarise −66%
  • Chat −75%
  • Code gen −77%
  • Agentic −66%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • 66K → 16K max output
  • no file, image, audio, video input
  • no extended reasoning
Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct Qwen1418.6 tie$0.350
  • Balanced −59%
  • Summarise −58%
  • Chat −55%
  • Code gen −56%
  • Agentic −51%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
  • no extended reasoning
DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus DeepSeek1419.6 tie$0.453
  • Balanced −47%
  • Summarise −20%
  • Chat −53%
  • Code gen −56%
  • Agentic −36%
  • 1.0M → 164K context
  • 66K → 33K max output
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Qwen1420.9 tie$0.632
  • Balanced −26%
  • Summarise −21%
  • Chat −22%
  • Code gen −24%
  • Agentic −15%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • 66K → 33K max output
  • no file, audio, video input
  • no extended reasoning
Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Qwen1417.9 tie$0.715
  • Balanced −16%
  • Chat −10%
  • Code gen −15%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • no file, audio input
DeepSeek V3.1 DeepSeek1419.1 tie$0.825
  • Balanced −3%
  • Chat −10%
  • Code gen −24%
  • 1.0M → 164K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
GLM 5 Z.ai1445.2 +27.9$0.984 chat
  • Chat −10%
  • Code gen −15%
  • 1.0M → 205K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Kimi K2.5 Moonshot AI1445.2 +27.9$1.06 chat
  • Chat −4%
  • Code gen −6%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • no file, audio, video input
GLM 4.6 Z.ai1439.8 +22.5$0.980 chat
  • Chat −11%
  • Code gen −14%
  • 1.0M → 205K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423 DeepSeek1439.2 +21.9$0.979 chat
  • Chat −11%
  • Code gen −17%
  • no file, image, audio, video input
Qwen3.5 397B A17B Qwen1438.3 +21$1.56 code gen
  • Code gen −2%
  • 1.0M → 262K context
  • no file, audio input
GLM 4.5 Z.ai1429.4 +12.1$1.09 chat
  • Chat −1%
  • Code gen −5%
  • 1.0M → 131K context
  • no file, image, audio, video input
R1 0528 DeepSeek1427.9 tie$1.48 code gen
  • Code gen −8%
  • 1.0M → 164K context
  • 66K → 33K max output
  • no file, image, audio, video input

What this compares, and what it leaves out

  • Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked tie rather than an improvement — see significance bands.
  • 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
  • Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
  • Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
  • The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the value frontier, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.