That’s not what frontier means.

There are two frontier labs - OpenAI and Anthropic, and maybe 4 frontier models currently. That term refers to model capacity and in general represents a model’s capability relative to the rest of the industry irrespective of price. That’s why even the Qwen announcement carries language about it being ‘near frontier’. Same with Kimi.

Whether a model is frontier or not has everything to do with capability and nothing to do with price.