$0.072 in / $0.287 out
- Context: 10M
- Providers: 2
- Tool calling
Best AI models · 2026-05-12
Best Long-Context LLMs in 2026
Models with the largest usable context windows.
How we picked these
- Minimum 200K tokens of context.
- We score on log10(context) — going from 200K to 2M matters more than 200K to 220K.
- Models without published pricing get a small penalty (less production-ready).
Top 12 picks
$0.170 in / $0.660 out
- Context: 3.50M
- Providers: 1
- Tool calling
- Vision
- Open weights
$0.170 in / $0.660 out
- Context: 3.50M
- Providers: 1
- Tool calling
- Vision
- Open weights
$0.200 in / $0.500 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 13
- Tool calling
- Vision
$0.200 in / $0.500 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 11
- Tool calling
- Vision
$0.180 in / $0.450 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 9
- Tool calling
- Reasoning
- Vision
$0.200 in / $0.500 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 8
- Tool calling
- Reasoning
- Vision
$0.200 in / $0.500 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 7
- Tool calling
- Reasoning
- Vision
$1.42 in / $2.83 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 4
- Tool calling
- Reasoning
$2.00 in / $6.00 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 1
- Tool calling
- Reasoning
- Vision
$2.00 in / $6.00 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 1
- Tool calling
- Vision
$2.00 in / $6.00 out
- Context: 2M
- Providers: 1
- Reasoning
- Vision
Recommended stack by tier
Same shortlist sliced four ways — pick the tier that matches your budget and constraints.
Budget
Alibaba (Qwen)$0.072 in / $0.287 out · 10M ctx
Lowest total per-1M-token cost in this list ($0.36).
Lowest-cost option that still meets the use case. Pick this when you have high volume or strict unit-economics.
Balanced
Meta$0.170 in / $0.660 out · 3.50M ctx
Median price ($0.83) — typically the safest default.
Good-enough quality at a mid-tier price. The default choice for most production apps.
Premium
xAI$2.00 in / $6.00 out · 2M ctx
Highest-priced pick in the list ($8.00) — usually the flagship.
Highest-capability model in this list. Pick when accuracy or reasoning matters more than cost.
Open-weight
No fit in this list
Open weights — self-host on your own GPUs, fine-tune on private data, run offline. Pricing here reflects the cheapest API host.
Frequently asked questions
Which AI model is the best for very long input documents in 2026?
Right now we put Qwen Long from Alibaba (Qwen) at the top, primarily because it accepts the most tokens in a single prompt while still publishing pricing for the full window. Rankings are recomputed from live model metadata — see "How we picked these" above for the exact rule.
What is the cheapest option in this list?
Qwen Long (Alibaba (Qwen)) is the lowest-priced pick at $0.072 per 1M input tokens and $0.287 per 1M output tokens. Costs from other entries scale up from there.
How are these rankings generated?
Each pick comes from a programmatic rule defined in our use-case-rules config: a hard filter (e.g. tool calling required, context ≥ 100K) plus a numeric score combining capability, context window and price. We never hand-curate the order, but we do hand-curate the rule. The full data source is the models.dev API, refreshed daily.
How often is this page updated?
The underlying model data is refreshed once per day from models.dev, and the static page is rebuilt when the data changes. The 'Last updated' date below shows the most recent rebuild.
Explore more
Top picks · model details
- Qwen Long$0.07 in / $0.29 out
- Llama 4 Scout 17B Instruct$0.17 in / $0.66 out
- Llama 4 Scout 17B Instruct (US)$0.17 in / $0.66 out
- Grok 4.1 Fast (Non-Reasoning)$0.20 in / $0.50 out
- Grok 4 Fast (Non-Reasoning)$0.20 in / $0.50 out
Other best-of lists
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Last updated:
Prices in USD per 1M tokens. Unknown means the provider does not publish per-token pricing.
Data is sourced from models.dev and normalized for comparison. Prices and capabilities may change. Always verify critical production decisions with the provider's official documentation.