“Cheap”, I was learnt ages ago, meant “shoddy”. “Cheapest” meant then “shoddiest”. Use “inexpensive”, and “least expensive”, respectively, to indicate cost, I was beaten into my brain. That was then, this is now. Even such reputable journals like the Wall Street Journal, employ “cheapest” when meaning “least costly”. Grrrrrh!
In fairness to the WSJ, cheap means inexpensive. It’s literally derived from the Old English word for bargain. We’ve informally bastardized it to mean shoddy, but that’s not it’s true meaning.