I like using 3.5-flash-lite for doing cheap PDF and Image data extraction stuff. I don't think there is a better bang / buck model right now (3.1 is cheaper but a lot worse).

5.6 Luna costs far less and benchmarks far better, have you compared for this task?

Uh snap it indeed is cheaper: $0.20 / $1.20 vs $0.30 / $2.50. Gemini is mostly good enough for what I do with it, but the cost savings are interesting. Gemini is still faster though.

Not sure how much the benchmarks can be trusted though: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleGeminiAI/comments/1vbq5vf/com...

You can use fast mode for 2.5x faster and it’ll still be cheaper on output tokens

Probably cheaper to run a Mac Mini with VisionKit (private APIs if you need bounding rects).