Is Llama 3.1 70B Instruct a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Llama 3.1 70B Instruct 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, Llama 3.1 70B Instruct is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 211.1 higher and costs 41% 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 Llama 3.1 70B Instruct: 211.1 points higher on LMArena and 41% less per million tokens, $0.16 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1260.8
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.400/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 27 models dominate it and give up nothing, 4 more dominate it but give something up. Llama 3.1 70B Instruct scores 1260.8 at $0.40 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 +211.1 | $0.237/M | 41% |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 +180.9 | $0.153/M | 62% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +179.8 | $0.144/M | 64% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +173.7 | $0.143/M | 64% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +171.0 | $0.103/M | 74% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +166.6 | $0.175/M | 56% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 +164.0 | $0.302/M | 25% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 +161.8 | $0.305/M | 24% |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 +159.0 | $0.153/M | 62% |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.6 +156.8 | $0.343/M | 14% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +142.9 | $0.150/M | 63% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +136.9 | $0.114/M | 72% |
| GLM 4.5 Air | 1383.7 +122.9 | $0.310/M | 23% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 +122.8 | $0.084/M | 79% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +116.5 | $0.158/M | 61% |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.9 +105.1 | $0.262/M | 34% |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 +96.9 | $0.172/M | 57% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1352.2 +91.4 | $0.145/M | 64% |
| Trinity Large Thinking | 1341.8 +81.0 | $0.388/M | 3% |
| Qwen3 32B | 1340.0 +79.2 | $0.130/M | 68% |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 +73.4 | $0.075/M | 81% |
| GPT-5 Nano | 1319.7 +58.9 | $0.138/M | 66% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B | 1317.0 +56.2 | $0.215/M | 46% |
| Granite 4.2 8B | 1316.8 +56.0 | $0.107/M | 73% |
| gpt-oss-20b | 1287.3 +26.5 | $0.036/M | 91% |
| GPT-4.1 Nano | 1284.7 +23.9 | $0.175/M | 56% |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | 1274.0 +13.2 | $0.155/M | 61% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury 2 | 1357.6 | $0.375/M | context |
| Gemma 3 4B | 1290.7 | $0.063/M | tools |
| GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) | 1286.3 | $0.262/M | context |
| Qwen2.5 72B Instruct | 1268.9 | $0.370/M | context |
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