Is Qwen2.5 72B Instruct a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen2.5 72B 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, Qwen2.5 72B Instruct is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 203.0 higher and costs 36% 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 Qwen2.5 72B Instruct: 203.0 points higher on LMArena and 36% less per million tokens, $0.13 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1268.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.370/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1471.9
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.237/M
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct takes text, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 32,768-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, 1 more dominates it but gives something up. Qwen2.5 72B Instruct scores 1268.9 at $0.37 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 +203.0 | $0.237/M | 36% |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1441.7 +172.8 | $0.153/M | 59% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +171.7 | $0.144/M | 61% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +165.6 | $0.143/M | 61% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +162.9 | $0.103/M | 72% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +158.5 | $0.175/M | 53% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.8 +155.9 | $0.302/M | 18% |
| DeepSeek V3.2 Exp | 1422.6 +153.7 | $0.305/M | 18% |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 +150.9 | $0.153/M | 59% |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | 1417.6 +148.7 | $0.343/M | 7% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +134.8 | $0.150/M | 59% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +128.8 | $0.114/M | 69% |
| GLM 4.5 Air | 1383.7 +114.8 | $0.310/M | 16% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 +114.7 | $0.084/M | 77% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +108.4 | $0.158/M | 57% |
| gpt-oss-120b | 1365.9 +97.0 | $0.262/M | 29% |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 +88.8 | $0.172/M | 53% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1352.2 +83.3 | $0.145/M | 61% |
| Qwen3 32B | 1340.0 +71.1 | $0.130/M | 65% |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 +65.3 | $0.075/M | 80% |
| GPT-5 Nano | 1319.7 +50.8 | $0.138/M | 63% |
| Qwen3 30B A3B | 1317.0 +48.1 | $0.215/M | 42% |
| Granite 4.2 8B | 1316.8 +47.9 | $0.107/M | 71% |
| gpt-oss-20b | 1287.3 +18.4 | $0.036/M | 90% |
| GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) | 1286.3 +17.4 | $0.262/M | 29% |
| GPT-4.1 Nano | 1284.7 +15.8 | $0.175/M | 53% |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | 1274.0 +5.1 | $0.155/M | 58% |
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 |
The link keeps the model and mix, using the current catalogue. Monthly spend and switching cost stay in this browser tab and are left out of the link.
Saved decision references
Save the model, workload, catalogue date and capability-preservation rule in this browser. Spend, switching cost and bill contents are not saved. No account or notifications.
Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
Historical decisions cannot be fully replayed from saved references: past prices, scores and capability evidence are not stored.