CoBuddy: pricing, context and performance

Overview

CoBuddy is a language model from Baidu (ERNIE), released on May 6, 2026. That makes it 5 months old as of October 22, 2026. Its weights are not published, so it only runs remotely, through the Baidu (ERNIE) API or partner hosts (1 listed on models.dev). It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money.

We file it under budget models (24 models in this category on the site).

Measured performance

As of October 22, 2026, Epoch AI publishes no score for CoBuddy on our basket's benchmarks. To place it, rely on its specifications and price, then test it on your own cases.

What it can do

Its context window reaches 131,072 tokens, roughly 197 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a medium-length document. A single answer can run to 65,536 tokens.

It accepts as input: text.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

How much does CoBuddy cost?

CoBuddy costs $0.28 per million input tokens and $1.13 per million output tokens (median of 1 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

In practice, an agent task that reads 20,000 tokens and writes 2,000 costs about $0.008, or $7.86 for 1,000 such tasks.

That is in line with budget models, whose median output price is $1.13.

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

What is it good for?

Given its category, CoBuddy is mainly aimed at high volumes where every cent counts: sorting, information extraction, summaries, simple assistants.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Comparable models

In the same category, the models closest to CoBuddy are:

• Qwen3.6 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 64.5)
• GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI, index 79.6)
• MAI-Code-1.1-Flash (Microsoft (Phi, MAI), $1.2 per million output tokens)
• Solar Pro 4 (Upstage, $1.2 per million output tokens)