At sub-1M tokens per month (typical SMB agent volume) in 2026, the absolute dollar gap between Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4o-mini, and Gemini 2.5 Flash is small enough (≤$3/month) that price is the wrong tiebreaker; tool-use reliability, instruction-following on long context, and ecosystem fit determine the right cheap-tier model per workload shape.

Cheap-tier API cost comparison. Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5 per MTok) is roughly 6-10x the per-token cost of Gemini Flash-Lite ($0.10/$0.40) or GPT-4o-mini ($0.15/$0.60) — the multiplier is real, the absolute number at SMB volume is not. Workload-shape recommendations: GPT-4o-mini for high-frequency triage, Claude Haiku for long-document review, Gemini Flash for research/synthesis.