pi-frontier

A daily-rebuilt snapshot of the frontier AI landscape — the latest models per provider × family × tier (release-date-first, no AI in the loop) spanning LLMs, multimodal, image, and video generators. It includes a complete reseller API route table and pricing data for every model. Available as a Node.js library, a CLI tool, and a static web UI.

Source: models.dev. The pipeline is purely deterministic and curates the top generative AI models globally.

Three ways to use it

1. Headless — npm install pi-frontier

import {
  getFrontierModels,
  cheapestRoute,
  filterCapability,
  findRoutes,
  getGeneratedAt,
} from 'pi-frontier';

getFrontierModels();                          // → All frontier model objects
getGeneratedAt();                             // → "2026-05-15"

cheapestRoute('glm-5-turbo');
// → { provider: 'zai-coding-plan', model_key: 'zai-coding-plan/glm-5-turbo',
//     model_id: 'glm-5-turbo', input_cost: 0, output_cost: 0, ... }

filterCapability({ reasoning: true, tools: true, minContext: 200_000, maxInputCost: 5 });
// → array of frontier models matching every constraint

findRoutes('gpt-5.5');
// → [ { frontier: {...}, routes: [ {provider,model_id,$,...}, ... ] }, ... ]

The bundled snapshots are also directly importable:

import frontier from 'pi-frontier/data/frontier';
import routes   from 'pi-frontier/data/routes';

Costs in getFrontierModels() entries are per token (USD). Routes use the raw catalog's native unit: per 1M tokens (USD). filterCapability takes its maxInputCost / maxOutputCost caps as $/1M for human-friendly input.

2. CLI — npx pi-frontier

npx pi-frontier                              # list all 44 frontier models
npx pi-frontier glm-5-turbo                  # frontier match + route table (★ = cheapest)
npx pi-frontier --reasoning --tools --min-context 200000
npx pi-frontier --vision --open-weights
npx pi-frontier gpt-5.5 --json               # machine-readable

Flags: --reasoning / --no-reasoning, --tools / --no-tools (maps to tool_call), --attachment / --no-attachment, --vision (image input), --audio (audio input), --open-weights / --no-open-weights.

Constraints: --min-context <tokens>, --max-input-cost <usd-per-1m>, --max-output-cost <usd-per-1m>.

Output: --routes (force route view without a pattern), --json, -h / --help.

3. Headed — ffrappo.github.io/pi-frontier

A single static page with the same filter logic. Filter by name, toggle capability chips, drag the context / max-cost sliders, click a card to see the full route table inline.

4. Raw JSON artifacts

Stable URLs anyone can fetch — no npm install, no API key, just curl:

| URL | Contents | | --- | --- | | https://ffrappo.github.io/pi-frontier/data/frontier_final.json | The 44-model frontier array | | https://ffrappo.github.io/pi-frontier/data/routes.json | Per-model full route table | | https://ffrappo.github.io/pi-frontier/FRONTIER_MODELS.md | Markdown dashboard |

curl -s https://ffrappo.github.io/pi-frontier/data/routes.json \
  | jq '.models["zai/glm-5-turbo"].routes[0]'

Both files are also pinned inside the npm tarball — import 'pi-frontier/data/frontier' gives you a build-time-frozen copy if you'd rather not depend on Pages.

How the snapshot is built

npm run all       # fetch → filter → frontier → routes
npm run fetch     # download the models.dev catalog
npm run filter    # flatten + release-date cutoff + normalize
npm run frontier  # dedup + prune + write final output
npm run routes    # precompute every frontier model's full route table
npm run where     # CLI lookup

filter.js — release-date-first cut

The primary filter is a release_date cutoff: drop every model whose release_date is older than MONTHS_THRESHOLD months (default 6). This single cut removes ~64% of the dump and all the legacy junk (GPT-3.5, Llama 3.x, Mixtral, o1, …) with no name regex and no AI. release_date is used — not last_updated, which is polluted by reseller catalog re-indexing. Models with no release_date survive (missing data is never grounds for dropping).

Also flattens the provider-keyed catalog to a clean single key (no double provider prefix), drops non-chat modalities (image/audio/video/embedding-only), and carries through both release_date and last_updated.

frontier.js — dedup, prune, finalize

The release-date cutoff is orthogonal to deduplication, so this stage still:

• Regional dedup — collapses regional creator mirrors (minimax-cn, moonshotai-cn, zhipuai→zai) that re-list the same models; keeps the global / cheaper-priced entry.
• Version-aware family pruning — keeps the top version per provider × family × tier.
• Keep newest in family — guarantees every surviving family keeps its current head even if its release_date is >6 months old. This closes the one real false-negative: a slow-cadence model like claude-haiku-4-5 (no Haiku successor shipped) would otherwise be wrongly aged out.

Writes data/frontier_final.json and the FRONTIER_MODELS.md dashboard. The final record carries model-intrinsic capability fields too: reasoning, tool_call, attachment, modalities ({input, output} arrays), open_weights, knowledge (cutoff date).

SCOPE env var (default creators) restricts to creators, creators+cloud, or all provider classes.

routes.js — every reseller copy of every frontier model

The frontier list is canonical (44 first-party rows), but the same model is typically also hosted under a dozen aggregators / clouds (openrouter, vercel, chutes, kilo, nano-gpt, …). routes.js precomputes that view into data/routes.json: for each frontier model, the full sorted route array (by input_cost asc). Routes are matched by last-segment-after-slash case-insensitive — so glm-5-turbo correctly collects zai/glm-5-turbo, openrouter/z-ai/glm-5-turbo, kilo/zai/glm-5-turbo, etc., while still ignoring strict variants like glm-5-turbo-fp8 (different last segment).

CI & freshness

• .github/workflows/daily.yml — runs the full pipeline at 03:17 UTC daily, commits if any of frontier_final.json, routes.json, or FRONTIER_MODELS.md changed.
• .github/workflows/pages.yml — every push to main redeploys the static UI + JSON artifacts to GitHub Pages.
• .github/workflows/publish.yml — pushing a vMAJOR.MINOR.PATCH tag publishes to npm with prepublishOnly: npm run all, so the tarball always ships a fresh snapshot.

Limitations

The pipeline is only as current as models.dev. A brand-new model may not appear here until models.dev adds it (PRs typically merge within days). If a model is missing, check whether models.dev has it yet before assuming a pipeline bug.

Tuning

MONTHS_THRESHOLD=3 npm run filter   # tighter cutoff — only models <3 months old
SCOPE=creators+cloud npm run frontier

License

MIT