For early-stage Indian teams, the API choice is rarely about model quality — all three are now good enough for most production workloads. It is about INR billing, GST handling, support response time, and Mumbai/Bangalore latency. We ran identical workloads against all three, INR-priced.

Anthropic wins on coding and long-context. OpenAI wins on voice and frontier reasoning. Gemini wins on price-per-token and Indic language support. Most Indian startups that ship serious workloads are running two of the three, not picking one.