At almost every budget, the best AI model you can buy is closed. An open-weight model wins at just 3% of price points, down from 41% in June.
Village’s LLM Atlas maps the price-performance frontier: the strongest AI model at every price point.
Open models win on value in bursts: a strong, cheap release, usually from DeepSeek, takes a wide band of budgets until the next closed model undercuts it. The latest closed releases have been both cheaper and stronger than anything open, so the band has shrunk to the very bottom of the price range.
This study uses Village’s LLM Atlas, which estimates a capability score for each model and reasoning setting from public benchmark results and, with a separate cost model, its cost per task from evaluators’ runs, described in its methodology. Costs are relative to GPT-5 at high effort. For each date, we take every model released by then and find the most capable one at each of 201 budgets spread evenly on a log scale from 1% to three times GPT-5’s cost. The scores are from October 31, 2026; Atlas updates as new results arrive.
