The LLM market evolves at a wild pace. For a Quebec SMB, how do you choose between Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Mistral, and the rest? Here’s our method.
Criterion 1: Hosting and Law 25 compliance
Not all LLMs handle your data the same way. Microsoft Azure OpenAI offers Canadian deployments, which is handy for Law 25. Anthropic via AWS Canada too. Direct OpenAI or Google Gemini are more complex on data residency.
Criterion 2: Real operational cost
The advertised price per token doesn’t tell the whole story. You need to consider: required context length, call frequency, fallback models. Across 100,000 requests/month, the gap between options can reach 60%.
Criterion 3: Performance on your use case
A “best” model according to public benchmarks may be inferior on your specific task. We systematically test 3-4 models in parallel on real client cases before recommending.
Our default recommendation
For most Quebec SMBs we work with: Claude (Sonnet or Opus depending on the task) via AWS Bedrock Canada. Excellent performance, Canadian hosting, reasonable price. But that’s a starting point. Each case deserves its own evaluation.