Cheaper alternatives to Qwen2.5 72B Instruct

Qwen LMArena 1269.1 $0.370/M on a balanced workload prices as of 2026-08-28

50 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, 53 score at least as high as Qwen2.5 72B Instruct and cost no more under at least one workload. 50 match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. 3 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 Qwen2.5 72B Instruct, it is not generated.

Where it holds

Workload	Qwen2.5 72B Instruct $/M	Better and cheaper	With a trade
Balanced	$0.370	25	2
Summarise	$0.362	49	3
Chat	$0.376	23	2
Code gen	$0.384	22	2
Agentic	$0.366	40	2

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	1269.1
Context window	33K
Max output	16K
Input modes	text
Tool use	yes
Extended reasoning	no

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. Full record for Qwen2.5 72B Instruct.

Better and cheaper, nothing given up 50

Each of these matches or beats Qwen2.5 72B Instruct 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	Gemma 4 31B Google	1441.7 +172.6	$0.152	Balanced −59% Summarise −75% Chat −53% Code gen −38% Agentic −72%
2	Hy3 Tencent	1441.2 +172.1	$0.144	Balanced −61% Summarise −79% Chat −57% Code gen −41% Agentic −77%
3	Gemma 4 26B A4B Google	1434.6 +165.5	$0.138	Balanced −63% Summarise −77% Chat −53% Code gen −40% Agentic −70%
4	DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek	1431.6 +162.5	$0.101	Balanced −73% Summarise −82% Chat −75% Code gen −68% Agentic −85%
5	MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi	1427.3 +158.2	$0.175	Balanced −53% Summarise −70% Chat −59% Code gen −45% Agentic −78%
6	DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek	1424.6 +155.5	$0.290	Balanced −22% Summarise −37% Chat −28% Code gen −16% Agentic −45%
7	DeepSeek V3.2 Exp DeepSeek	1424.4 +155.3	$0.305	Balanced −18% Summarise −23% Chat −13% Code gen −8% Agentic −20%
8	Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 Qwen	1419.3 +150.2	$0.205	Balanced −45% Summarise −69% Chat −27% Code gen −5% Agentic −57%
9	Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct Qwen	1418.6 +149.5	$0.350	Balanced −5% Summarise −61% Agentic −37%
10	Step 3.5 Flash StepFun	1403.8 +134.7	$0.150	Balanced −59% Summarise −70% Chat −52% Code gen −43% Agentic −64%
11	Qwen3.5-Flash Qwen	1397.6 +128.5	$0.114	Balanced −69% Summarise −79% Chat −62% Code gen −53% Agentic −74%
12	Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 Qwen	1384.3 +115.2	$0.084	Balanced −77% Summarise −85% Chat −72% Code gen −65% Agentic −81%
13	Solar Pro 4 Upstage	1376.2 +107.1	$0.052	Balanced −86% Summarise −92% Chat −84% Code gen −79% Agentic −92%
14	GLM 4.5 Air Z.ai	1382.8 +113.7	$0.310	Balanced −16% Summarise −62% Agentic −52%
15	gpt-oss-120b OpenAI	1365.6 +96.5	$0.070	Balanced −81% Summarise −88% Chat −76% Code gen −70% Agentic −84%
16	Gemma 3 27B Google	1358.3 +89.2	$0.172	Balanced −53% Summarise −76% Chat −43% Code gen −22% Agentic −69%
17	GLM 4.7 Flash Z.ai	1352.9 +83.8	$0.145	Balanced −61% Summarise −83% Chat −52% Code gen −32% Agentic −78%
18	Qwen3 32B Qwen	1340.1 +71	$0.130	Balanced −65% Summarise −75% Chat −57% Code gen −48% Agentic −70%
19	Gemma 3 12B Google	1334.2 +65.1	$0.075	Balanced −80% Summarise −85% Chat −76% Code gen −71% Agentic −82%
20	GPT-5 Nano OpenAI	1320.3 +51.2	$0.138	Balanced −63% Summarise −85% Chat −53% Code gen −33% Agentic −79%
21	Qwen3 30B A3B Qwen	1316.9 +47.8	$0.215	Balanced −42% Summarise −62% Chat −28% Code gen −9% Agentic −52%
22	Granite 4.1 8B IBM	1291.6 +22.5	$0.063	Balanced −83% Summarise −85% Chat −81% Code gen −79% Agentic −84%
23	gpt-oss-20b OpenAI	1287.8 +18.7	$0.055	Balanced −85% Summarise −90% Chat −81% Code gen −77% Agentic −88%
24	GPT-4.1 Nano OpenAI	1284.8 +15.7	$0.175	Balanced −53% Summarise −74% Chat −47% Code gen −29% Agentic −73%
25	GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) OpenAI	1286.6 +17.5	$0.263	Balanced −29% Summarise −58% Chat −18% Agentic −53%
26	Gemini 3.7 Flash Google	1490.2 +221.1	$0.354 summarise	Summarise −2%
27	MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi	1465 +195.9	$0.334 summarise	Summarise −8% Agentic −33%
28	Qwen3.7 Plus Qwen	1456.2 +187.1	$0.295 summarise	Summarise −19% Agentic −15%
29	Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite Google	1436.5 +167.4	$0.333 summarise	Summarise −8%
30	MiniMax M3 MiniMax	1434.8 +165.7	$0.277 summarise	Summarise −24% Agentic −20%
31	GPT-5.6 Luna OpenAI	1428.5 +159.4	$0.199 summarise	Summarise −45% Agentic −34%
32	Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Instruct Qwen	1420.9 +151.8	$0.263 summarise	Summarise −27%
33	DeepSeek V3.1 Terminus DeepSeek	1419.6 +150.5	$0.268 summarise	Summarise −26% Agentic −18%
34	Qwen3.5-122B-A10B Qwen	1417.9 +148.8	$0.351 summarise	Summarise −3%
35	Gemini 2.5 Flash Google	1417.3 +148.2	$0.333 summarise	Summarise −8%
36	Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview Google	1414.8 +145.7	$0.248 summarise	Summarise −31% Agentic −17%
37	Qwen3 235B A22B Thinking 2507 Qwen	1413.8 +144.7	$0.334 summarise	Summarise −8%
38	Inkling Small Thinking Machines	1411.7 +142.6	$0.354 agentic	Agentic −3%
39	Qwen3.5-27B Qwen	1407.9 +138.8	$0.263 summarise	Summarise −27%
40	MiniMax M2.7 MiniMax	1405.3 +136.2	$0.277 summarise	Summarise −24% Agentic −20%
41	Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Qwen	1395.6 +126.5	$0.300 summarise	Summarise −17%
42	GLM 4.6V Z.ai	1374.7 +105.6	$0.260 summarise	Summarise −28% Agentic −33%
43	GPT-5.4 Nano OpenAI	1372.8 +103.7	$0.201 summarise	Summarise −44% Agentic −32%
44	DeepSeek V3 0324 DeepSeek	1375 +105.9	$0.287 summarise	Summarise −21% Agentic −1%
45	GPT-5 Mini OpenAI	1373.4 +104.3	$0.273 summarise	Summarise −24%
46	Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking Qwen	1367.5 +98.4	$0.203 summarise	Summarise −44% Agentic −16%
47	Mercury 2 Inception	1357.8 +88.7	$0.211 summarise	Summarise −42% Agentic −48%
48	MiniMax M2.5 MiniMax	1359 +89.9	$0.241 summarise	Summarise −33% Agentic −33%
49	Trinity Large Thinking Arcee	1341.9 +72.8	$0.206 summarise	Summarise −43% Agentic −40%
50	MiniMax M2 MiniMax	1342.1 +73	$0.293 summarise	Summarise −19%

Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 3

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
Olmo 3 32B Think Allen AI	1298.5 +29.4	$0.237	Balanced −36% Summarise −54% Chat −23% Code gen −6% Agentic −45%	no tool use
Gemma 3 4B Google	1290.8 +21.7	$0.063	Balanced −83% Summarise −85% Chat −81% Code gen −79% Agentic −84%	no tool use
DeepSeek V3 DeepSeek	1332.6 +63.5	$0.296 summarise	Summarise −18%	16K → 16K max output

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.