---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/google__gemini-3.1-pro-preview/
description: "3 models score at least as high as Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 1 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview · Undominated.ai

> 3 models score at least as high as Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and cost no more on a balanced workload. 2 give up nothing measurable; the other 1 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview

Google · LMArena 1479.5 · $4.50/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 2 models are both better and cheaper, giving up nothing.

Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, **3** score at least as high as Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview and cost no more under at least one workload. **2** match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. **1** does not, and every row names what it drops.

Dominance is not a property of a model. It is a property of a model, a capability lens and a workload, and all three are named on every row. Scores are LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset; prices are blended per million tokens. A higher score is not a drop-in replacement.

This page is built from that comparison and nothing else. When no model is both better and cheaper than Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $4.50 | 2 | 1 |
| Summarise | $1.99 | 2 | 1 |
| Chat | $5.46 | 2 | 1 |
| Code gen | $7.86 | 2 | 1 |
| Agentic | $2.43 | 2 | 1 |

Workload mixes are defined on the [methodology page](/methodology/). Cached input is priced at the cached rate, and reasoning tokens at the worse of the reasoning and output rates.

## What you would be replacing

| Intelligence | 1479.5 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 1.0M |
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | audio, file, image, text, video |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview](/models/google__gemini-3.1-pro-preview/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 2

Each of these matches or beats Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview on context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and reasoning, scores at least as high, and costs no more.

| # | Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | Gemini 3.7 Flash Google | 1490.2 +10.7 | $0.750 | Balanced −83% Summarise −82% Chat −84% Code gen −84% Agentic −84% |
| 2 | Gemini 3.5 Flash Google | 1482.6 tie | $3.38 | Balanced −25% Summarise −25% Chat −25% Code gen −25% Agentic −25% |

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 1

These score at least as high and cost no more on the two plotted axes, and lose something that is not on them. Read the last column before switching.

| Model | Intelligence | $/M | Holds under | What you give up |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Qwen3.8 Max Qwen | 1481.9 tie | $3.00 | Balanced −33% Summarise −14% Chat −44% Code gen −46% Agentic −36% | 1.0M → 1.0M context no audio, file input |

## What this compares, and what it leaves out

 - Quality is LMArena Elo, used under CC BY 4.0 from the official dataset. The 95% confidence interval on a difference between two scores is about ±10.68 points, so a gap smaller than that is marked *tie* rather than an improvement — see [significance bands](/significance/).
 - 188 further models at this delivery mode carry a price but no independent score. They are absent from the comparison in both directions — unrated is not a zero, and an unmeasured model is neither an alternative nor a worse buy.
 - Retired models are never offered as an alternative, and a model only competes against its own delivery mode: batch trades latency for price, so it is not a like-for-like swap.
 - Nothing here measures latency, throughput, rate limits or how a model behaves on your prompts. Two models with the same index score are not interchangeable.
 - The models that nothing beats on both axes are on the [value frontier](/frontier/), and every other model something cheaper beats is [listed here](/alternatives/).