The open weights models absolutely compete with flagship labs for most tasks. OpenAI and Anthropic's "cheap tier" models are completely uncompetitive with them for "quality / $" and it's not close. Google is the only one who has remained competitive in the <$5/1M output tier with Flash, and now has an incredibly strong release with Gemma 4.

Unless you have a corporate lock-in/compliance need, there has been no reason to use Haiku or GPT mini/nano/etc over open weights models for a long time now.