For quick everyday questions, speed matters more than raw power. Gemini 3.6 Flash is the best everyday pick: it is fast, reads long text and is on the Free plan. Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s fastest model, and Gemini 3.5 Flash adds photo understanding and web search.
Fastest Claude
Anthropic’s fastest model, built for real-time replies with near-frontier intelligence.
For photos and current answers
Understands photos and searches the web, so it can answer questions about today.
Prices are each provider’s list price.
| Model | Plan | Input price | Output price | Reads up to | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | Free | $0.75 per 1M tokens | $3.75 per 1M tokens | 1.0M tokens | Fast |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Free | $1 per 1M tokens | $5 per 1M tokens | 200K tokens | Fast |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | Free | $1.50 per 1M tokens | $9 per 1M tokens | 1M tokens | Fast |
| GPT-5.4 Mini | Free | $0.75 per 1M tokens | $4.50 per 1M tokens | 400K tokens | Balanced |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite | Free | $0.10 per 1M tokens | $0.40 per 1M tokens | 1M tokens | Fast |
Most questions are small: a recipe swap, a word you cannot remember, a reply to a message. For these, response time is the whole experience, and a fast model that answers in a second beats a brilliant one that takes ten.
Current information matters for anything about today, such as opening hours or the news, which needs a model that can search the web.
Understanding photos turns “what is this plant?” or “what does this error message mean?” into one quick step instead of a description.
For everyday questions, rarely. The difference shows on hard problems, which is when Auto hands the question to a stronger model.
Yes. Every model in this guide is on the Free plan.