Phi 4

Phi 4 is a small open model from Microsoft, released 2025-01-10 under the MIT licence, listed on OpenRouter at $0.07 per million input tokens and $0.14 output. Its context is only 16,384 tokens, far below the million-token context of newer models, which limits it for long documents. MIT is a standard permissive licence, so commercial use is clear. We would suggest it for local use where a small model is a feature, and for cheap short tasks. The limit is the short context and its age relative to newer models in our list, so we would test it against Gemma 4 or Mistral Small 4 before choosing it. Our Phi page covers sizes from 3.8B to 15B and hardware needs. Prices and specifications come from the OpenRouter listing we checked on 31 October 2026, and we have not tested the model ourselves.