Answer five questions. Leave with a model stack you can actually use.

Why this recommendation is opinionated

The tool prefers reliable decisions over vague flexibility.

Tool-call reliability is treated as a hard constraint when you say it matters. Free and local paths only open when your answers make them realistic. If your combination does not match one of the verified branches, the picker falls back to Claude Sonnet 4.6 with Claude Haiku 4.5 as the safer default.

Pricing data is hardcoded from the calculator reference set. Last updated: 2026-03-11.