Is R1 0528 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats R1 0528 on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
13 undominated of 136 · Sep 23, 2026
As of Sep 23, 2026, R1 0528 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 44.4 higher and costs 74% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than R1 0528: 44.4 points higher on LMArena and 74% less per million tokens, $0.68 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1427.5
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.912/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
R1 0528 takes text, returns up to 32,768 tokens from a 163,840-token context, and is listed by 4 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 12 models dominate it and give up nothing, 2 more dominate it but give something up. R1 0528 scores 1427.5 at $0.91 per million tokens for this mix.
Envelope-safe replacements
Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1471.9 +44.4 | $0.237/M | 74% |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1464.8 +37.3 | $0.544/M | 40% |
| Qwen3.7 Plus | 1454.2 +26.7 | $0.560/M | 39% |
| Kimi K2.5 | 1445.6 +18.1 | $0.900/M | 1% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +13.1 | $0.144/M | 84% |
| Qwen3.6 Plus | 1436.7 +9.2 | $0.731/M | 20% |
| GLM 4.7 | 1435.9 +8.4 | $0.738/M | 19% |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | 1435.5 +8.0 | $0.850/M | 7% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +7.0 | $0.143/M | 84% |
| MiniMax M3 | 1433.5 +6.0 | $0.525/M | 42% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +4.3 | $0.103/M | 89% |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | 1429.9 +2.4 | $0.450/M | 51% |
Higher score, lower price, named losses
Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.
| Model | LMArena | Effective $/M | You give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 | $0.153/M | max output |
| GLM 4.6 | 1440.5 | $0.760/M | max output |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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