Router dev crowdsources production model picks beyond the big four as small-model gap narrows
Remarkable-Guille · reddit · 2026-10-25
Reddit user building Zabio, a model router that sends each request to the cheapest capable model, says most traffic flows to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and DeepSeek, with GLM, Qwen, Mistral, Grok and JEV also tested. They ask the community which vendors are missing.
Key observation from their internal testing: the quality gap between low-end and top-tier models keeps narrowing — on everyday work like classification, extraction, short summaries and simple tool calls, smaller models land close enough that premium pricing is hard to justify, making the vendor long tail more interesting than a year ago.
They want specifics: exact model names (e.g. qwen3-coder), production tasks, why it beat the big four (price, latency, quality, availability), including dropped options; regional providers and open-weight hosts count.
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