Provider Tiers

Provider Tiers Overview#

ModelStack categorizes all models into three pricing tiers. Understanding provider tiers — and which wallet pays for them — helps you choose the right model for your budget and use case.

Tier System#

Each tier has two separate rates: one for your bonus wallet, one for your prepaid wallet. These are genuinely different numbers, not two views on the same discount — see How a Request Can Split Across Wallets below for why that matters.

A few model families get a deeper prepaid discount than the defaults above. These overrides only ever apply to the prepaid rate — bonus rates and Premium are never overridden:

• Standard tier: Anthropic models default to 0.35x, OpenAI models default to 0.2x, and two specific models (gpt-5.4, gpt-5.6-terra) are pinned to 0.2x directly.
• Economy tier: no overrides exist yet — every model currently uses the 0.2x default.

How a Request Can Split Across Wallets#

Because bonus and prepaid rate the same tier differently, a single Economy or Standard request can be billed partly from each wallet — at each wallet's own rate — within the same transaction.

Here's the mechanism: the bonus wallet covers as much of the request's raw provider cost as your available bonus balance can afford at bonus's rate. The prepaid wallet covers whatever raw cost is left over, at prepaid's rate. The two portions add up to the total charge, so the "discount" you see on that transaction is a blended, effective rate — not simply one of the two table values above.

Worked example — Standard tier, $100 raw provider cost, $30 available bonus balance, prepaid funded:

1. Bonus can afford $30 ÷ 1.5x = $20 worth of raw cost, and is charged the full $30 for that slice.
2. The remaining $80 of raw cost goes to prepaid at 0.5x = $40.
3. Total charged: $70 for $100 of raw cost — a blended 0.7x effective rate, even though neither wallet's own rate is 0.7x.

If that same user had no bonus balance at all, the full $100 would go to prepaid at 0.5x = $50 — the tier's plain default rate, with no blending.

Providers by Tier#

Anthropic#

Key Features:

• Extended context windows (up to 1M tokens on newer models)
• Strong reasoning and instruction following
• Excellent code generation
• Tool use and function calling
• Vision capabilities (Opus/Sonnet)

OpenAI#

Key Features:

• Strong general knowledge
• Fast response times
• Excellent at following instructions
• Function calling and tools
• Vision capabilities (GPT-4o family)
• Reasoning tokens (o1 models)

Google (Gemini)#

Key Features:

• Massive context windows (up to 2M tokens)
• Native multimodal (text, image, audio, video)
• Strong reasoning and analysis
• Fast inference (Flash models)
• Open weights available (Gemma)

DeepSeek#

Key Features:

• Exceptional value for reasoning
• Strong code understanding
• Chinese language support
• Very competitive pricing

MiniMax#

Key Features:

• Chinese language excellence
• Conversational capabilities
• Competitive pricing
• Low latency in Asia

ZAI (GLM)#

Key Features:

• Chinese language support
• Fast inference
• Regional availability (Asia)

Qwen#

Key Features:

• Specialized for code
• Multi-language support
• Fast generation

Choosing the Right Tier#

Use Economy When:#

• You're running ultra high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads — batch jobs, background pipelines, bulk classification
• Raw quality bar is low and cost per request matters more than anything else
• You're paying from prepaid — Economy's 0.2x default prepaid rate is the cheapest way to run a model, deeper than Standard's discount
• You're paying from bonus and want to stretch it as far as possible — Economy is the only tier where bonus buys full face value (1.0x, no markup)

Examples:

• Bulk data labeling and tagging
• Large-scale embeddings-adjacent preprocessing
• Background summarization jobs with no latency/quality pressure

Use Standard When:#

• You need balanced performance and cost
• Workloads range from development to high-volume production
• Tasks require good reasoning but not exceptional
• You want reliable, consistent quality at a discount
• You're paying from prepaid — Standard's default 0.5x rate (less for some model families) beats Premium's full price

Examples:

• Code autocomplete suggestions
• Simple text classification and data extraction
• Chat responses for FAQs and customer support
• Content generation and document summarization
• Code review and general-purpose AI features

Use Premium When:#

• Tasks require complex reasoning
• Quality is critical over cost
• You need best-in-class performance
• Low volume, high-impact requests
• Difficult problems that simpler models struggle with

Examples:

• Legal document analysis
• Complex code generation
• Research and analysis
• Creative writing (novels, scripts)
• Multi-step problem solving
• Advanced reasoning tasks

Provider-Specific Considerations#

Context Window Sizes#

Multimodal Capabilities#

Vision (Image Understanding):

• ✅ Claude Opus/Sonnet
• ✅ GPT-4o models
• ✅ Gemini all models

Tool Use/Function Calling:

• ✅ All Anthropic models
• ✅ All OpenAI GPT models
• ✅ Gemini Pro models

Reasoning Tokens#

Some models expose internal reasoning:

• o1 models (OpenAI): Reasoning tokens separate from output
• Claude Opus: Extended thinking mode
• DeepSeek v4: Internal reasoning chain

Cost Optimization Tips#

1. Start Economy or Standard, Upgrade as Needed#

Begin with Economy or Standard tier models for testing and development. Economy is cheapest on prepaid (0.2x default) but carries no bonus discount (1.0x); Standard is a smaller prepaid discount (0.5x default) but still beats Premium. Upgrade to Premium only when quality requirements justify paying full price.

2. Mix and Match Tiers#

Use different tiers for different tasks:

• Economy: Bulk, low-stakes, background work where cost per request matters most
• Standard: Autocomplete, drafts, customer-facing generation, most production traffic
• Premium: Complex analysis, critical decisions

3. Leverage Model Stacks#

Create model stacks with:

1. Economy or Standard model as primary (discounted on prepaid, covers most tasks)
2. Premium model as fallback (guaranteed quality when the cheaper tier isn't enough)

4. Monitor Provider Performance#

Track which providers work best for your use case:

• Response time: Some providers are faster in certain regions
• Quality: Test different providers for your specific task
• Reliability: Monitor error rates and availability

5. Use Premium Deliberately#

Premium requests are billed from your prepaid wallet only, at full price (1.0x — no discount). Bonus balance can never pay for Premium, even if you have plenty of it. Your dashboard shows a monthly premium budget figure for cost awareness, but it's informational only — it doesn't gate or block Premium usage. Reserve Premium for requests that genuinely need it, since it's always more expensive than Economy or Standard's discounted prepaid rates.

Regional Considerations#

North America & Europe#

Best latency: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Recommended: Claude Sonnet, GPT-4o, Gemini Pro

Asia-Pacific#

Best latency: DeepSeek, MiniMax, Qwen, GLM Recommended: DeepSeek v4-flash, MiniMax models

Chinese Language#

Best support: DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM, Qwen Recommended: GLM-5, DeepSeek v4-pro for complex tasks

Provider Reliability#

ModelStack automatically handles provider failures through model stacks:

• Automatic fallback: If primary provider fails, try next model
• Health monitoring: Real-time provider status tracking
• Retry logic: Automatic retries with exponential backoff

Check current provider status in your Dashboard.

Next Steps#

• View all supported models
• Create model stacks for automatic fallback
• Check pricing for detailed cost comparison
• Monitor usage by provider and tier