Is Llama 3.3 70B Instruct a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Llama 3.3 70B Instruct 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 145 · Oct 6, 2026
As of Oct 6, 2026, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash scores 188.4 higher and costs 9% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is both better and cheaper than Llama 3.3 70B Instruct: 188.4 points higher on LMArena and 9% less per million tokens, $0.019 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1274.1
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.201/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1462.5
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.182/M
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 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 18 models dominate it and give up nothing, 1 more dominates it but gives something up. Llama 3.3 70B Instruct scores 1274.1 at $0.201 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 +188.4 | $0.182/M | 9% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 +182.3 | $0.175/M | 13% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1433.9 +159.8 | $0.127/M | 37% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1432.1 +158.0 | $0.113/M | 44% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.5 +153.4 | $0.175/M | 13% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.0 +128.9 | $0.150/M | 25% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.0 +122.9 | $0.114/M | 43% |
| GPT-6 Luna | 1391.5 +117.4 | $0.200/M | 1% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1384.1 +110.0 | $0.143/M | 29% |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.4 +91.3 | $0.065/M | 68% |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.8 +83.7 | $0.100/M | 50% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1350.9 +76.8 | $0.145/M | 28% |
| Qwen3 32B | 1340.1 +66.0 | $0.130/M | 35% |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 +60.1 | $0.075/M | 63% |
| GPT-5 Nano | 1320.0 +45.9 | $0.138/M | 32% |
| Granite 4.2 8B | 1317.8 +43.7 | $0.108/M | 47% |
| gpt-oss-20b | 1287.7 +13.6 | $0.036/M | 82% |
| GPT-4.1 Nano | 1284.8 +10.7 | $0.175/M | 13% |
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 | 1290.8 | $0.063/M | tools |
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