---
title: "Cheaper alternatives to Step 3.5 Flash · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/alternatives/stepfun__step-3.5-flash/
description: "5 models score at least as high as Step 3.5 Flash and cost no more on a balanced workload. 3 give up nothing measurable; the other 2 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores."
---

# Cheaper alternatives to Step 3.5 Flash · Undominated.ai

> 5 models score at least as high as Step 3.5 Flash and cost no more on a balanced workload. 3 give up nothing measurable; the other 2 name what they drop. Measured prices and independent scores.

# Cheaper alternatives to Step 3.5 Flash

StepFun · LMArena 1403.8 · $0.150/M on a balanced workload · prices as of 2026-08-28

## 3 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, **5** score at least as high as Step 3.5 Flash and cost no more under at least one workload. **3** match or beat it on every capability we hold — context, maximum output, input modes, tool use and extended reasoning. **2** 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 Step 3.5 Flash, it is not generated.

## Where it holds

| Workload | Step 3.5 Flash $/M | Better and cheaper | With a trade |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Balanced | $0.150 | 2 | 1 |
| Summarise | $0.110 | 3 | 2 |
| Chat | $0.180 | 3 | 2 |
| Code gen | $0.220 | 2 | 0 |
| Agentic | $0.130 | 3 | 2 |

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 | 1403.8 |
| --- | --- |
| Context window | 262K |
| Max output | 66K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Extended reasoning | yes |

A replacement has to clear every line above, not just the score. [Full record for Step 3.5 Flash](/models/stepfun__step-3.5-flash/).

## Better and cheaper, nothing given up 3

Each of these matches or beats Step 3.5 Flash 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 | Hy3 Tencent | 1441.2 +37.4 | $0.144 | Balanced −4% Summarise −30% Chat −10% Agentic −36% |
| 2 | DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 DeepSeek | 1431.6 +27.8 | $0.101 | Balanced −32% Summarise −39% Chat −48% Code gen −43% Agentic −58% |
| 3 | MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi | 1427.3 +23.5 | $0.108 summarise | Summarise −2% Chat −14% Code gen −3% Agentic −39% |

## Cheaper and higher-scoring, but you give something up 2

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 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B Google | 1434.6 +30.8 | $0.138 | Balanced −8% Summarise −24% Chat −1% Agentic −15% | 66K → 16K max output |
| Gemma 4 31B Google | 1441.7 +37.9 | $0.091 summarise | Summarise −17% Chat −1% Agentic −20% | 66K → 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](/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/).