Is gpt-oss-120b a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats gpt-oss-120b 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, gpt-oss-120b is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 106.0 higher and costs 10% 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 gpt-oss-120b: 106.0 points higher on LMArena and 10% less per million tokens, $0.02 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1365.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.262/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
gpt-oss-120b takes text, returns up to 65,536 tokens from a 131,072-token context, and is listed by 24 sellers. Open weights, so it can also be self-hosted.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 8 models dominate it and give up nothing, 3 more dominate it but give something up. gpt-oss-120b scores 1365.9 at $0.26 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 +106.0 | $0.237/M | 10% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +74.7 | $0.144/M | 45% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +68.6 | $0.143/M | 46% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +65.9 | $0.103/M | 61% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +61.5 | $0.175/M | 33% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +37.8 | $0.150/M | 43% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +31.8 | $0.114/M | 57% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +11.4 | $0.158/M | 40% |
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 |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | reasoning |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 | $0.084/M | max output, reasoning |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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