Is Llama 3.3 70B Instruct a good deal?

As of Sep 23, 2026, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemma 4 31B scores 167.7 higher and costs 2% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

Gemma 4 31B is both better and cheaper than Llama 3.3 70B Instruct: 167.7 points higher on LMArena and 2% less per million tokens, $0.00 cheaper at this mix.

Llama 3.3 70B Instruct takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 11 sellers.

Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 14 models dominate it and give up nothing, 1 more dominates it but gives something up. Llama 3.3 70B Instruct scores 1274 at $0.16 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
Gemma 4 31B	1441.7 +167.7	$0.153/M	2%
Hy3	1440.6 +166.6	$0.144/M	7%
Gemma 4 26B A4B	1434.5 +160.5	$0.143/M	8%
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423	1431.8 +157.8	$0.103/M	33%
Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507	1419.8 +145.8	$0.153/M	1%
Step 3.5 Flash	1403.7 +129.7	$0.150/M	3%
Qwen3.5-Flash	1397.7 +123.7	$0.114/M	27%
Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507	1383.6 +109.6	$0.084/M	46%
GLM 4.7 Flash	1352.2 +78.2	$0.145/M	6%
Qwen3 32B	1340.0 +66.0	$0.130/M	16%
Gemma 3 12B	1334.2 +60.2	$0.075/M	52%
GPT-5 Nano	1319.7 +45.7	$0.138/M	11%
Granite 4.2 8B	1316.8 +42.8	$0.107/M	31%
gpt-oss-20b	1287.3 +13.3	$0.036/M	77%

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 3 4B	1290.7	$0.063/M	tools

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