Is Granite 4.2 8B a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Granite 4.2 8B on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
12 undominated of 136 · Sep 22, 2026
As of Sep 22, 2026, Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 scores higher and costs less than Granite 4.2 8B for Balanced on LMArena, but it is not a drop-in. You would give up: max output, reasoning.
Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 scores 66.8 points higher and costs 22% less, but you would give up: max output, reasoning.
Granite 4.2 8B takes text, returns up to 117,964 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 2 more dominate it but give something up. Granite 4.2 8B scores 1316.8 at $0.11 per million tokens for this mix.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 | $0.084/M | max output, reasoning |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 | $0.075/M | max output, reasoning |
This page does not mail you. The URL is the watch: same model, same mix, current catalogue.
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