Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini
ScaleDown: Extract
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$80.50
$3.00
ScaleDown: Extract saves $77.50
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$98.00
$4.80
ScaleDown: Extract saves $93.20
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$101
$4.80
ScaleDown: Extract saves $96.00
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$64.40
$3.20
ScaleDown: Extract saves $61.20
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$36.40
$2.00
ScaleDown: Extract saves $34.40
Capabilities side by side
Capability
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini
ScaleDown: Extract
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
—
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
—
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
—
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
—
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
—
✓ Yes
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
—
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-24.
ScaleDown: Extract: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-14.
Which should you choose?
Choose AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini if…
you need tool / function calling — to call your APIs and run agent loops; ScaleDown: Extract does not advertise it
you need structured output (JSON schema) — to return JSON that validates against your schema; ScaleDown: Extract does not advertise it
you need reasoning / thinking mode — to spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems; ScaleDown: Extract does not advertise it
Choose ScaleDown: Extract if…
cost matters at scale — it is 97% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($3.00 vs $80.50 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need to fit long inputs in one request — 1M tokens is roughly 1,500 pages, against 393
you need image input — to read screenshots, charts and scanned pages; AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini does not advertise it
you need file / PDF input — to accept documents without your own parsing step; AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 900K tokens (about 675,000 words) per response
Frequently asked questions
Is AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini better than ScaleDown: Extract?
Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini is the pick when you need tool / function calling, ScaleDown: Extract when cost matters at scale. In short: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini when you need tool / function calling, you need structured output (JSON schema), you need reasoning / thinking mode; ScaleDown: Extract when cost matters at scale, you need to fit long inputs in one request, you need image input, you need file / PDF input, you generate long outputs in one go.
Which is cheaper, AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini or ScaleDown: Extract?
ScaleDown: Extract is cheaper: $0.03 vs $0.87 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 97% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $3.00 against $80.50.
How much do AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini and ScaleDown: Extract cost per million tokens?
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini costs $0.70 per 1M input tokens and $1.40 per 1M output tokens; ScaleDown: Extract costs $0.04 input and $0 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini or ScaleDown: Extract?
ScaleDown: Extract: 1M tokens, about 1,500 pages, against 262K (about 393 pages) for AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini.
Do AionLabs: Aion 3.5 Mini and ScaleDown: Extract support function calling and JSON output?
Aion 3.5 Mini is a multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system from AionLabs, built on the GLM family of models. It is the smaller, lower-cost sibling of Aion 3.5 and uses...
Extract is a description-driven entity extraction model from ScaleDown. Instead of a fixed set of entity types, callers describe the fields they want in plain English through `provider.options.scaledown.entities`, and the...