Cheaper alternatives to Gemma 3 4B
Google LMArena 1290.8 $0.063/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28
Everything cheaper and higher-scoring gives something up.
Of the 133 models carrying both an independent score and a published price at the same delivery mode, 4 score at least as high as Gemma 3 4B and cost no more under at least one workload. 3 of them are genuinely cheaper; the rest match the price and win on score alone. 4 do 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 Gemma 3 4B, it is not generated.
Where it holds
| Workload | Gemma 3 4B $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Balanced | $0.063 | 0 | 2 |
| Summarise | $0.052 | 0 | 3 |
| Chat | $0.070 | 0 | 2 |
| Code gen | $0.080 | 0 | 1 |
| Agentic | $0.058 | 0 | 4 |
Workload mixes are defined on the methodology page. 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 | 1290.8 |
|---|---|
| Context window | 131K |
| Max output | 16K |
| Input modes | text, image |
| Tool use | no |
| Extended reasoning | no |
A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Gemma 3 4B.
Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 4
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solar Pro 4 Upstage | 1376.2 +85.4 | $0.052 |
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| Granite 4.1 8B IBM | 1291.6 tie | $0.063 |
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| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek | 1431.6 +140.8 | $0.055 agentic |
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| gpt-oss-120b OpenAI | 1365.6 +74.8 | $0.044 summarise |
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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.
- 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, and every other model something cheaper beats is listed here.