Is Qwen3 30B A3B a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3 30B A3B 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, Qwen3 30B A3B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. Gemma 4 31B scores 124.7 higher and costs 29% 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 Qwen3 30B A3B: 124.7 points higher on LMArena and 29% less per million tokens, $0.06 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1317.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.215/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1441.7
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.153/M
Qwen3 30B A3B 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: 11 models dominate it and give up nothing, 4 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3 30B A3B scores 1317 at $0.21 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 +124.7 | $0.153/M | 29% |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 +123.6 | $0.144/M | 33% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 +117.5 | $0.143/M | 34% |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +114.8 | $0.103/M | 52% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.4 +110.4 | $0.175/M | 19% |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 +86.7 | $0.150/M | 30% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.7 +80.7 | $0.114/M | 47% |
| Solar Pro 4 | 1377.3 +60.3 | $0.158/M | 27% |
| GLM 4.7 Flash | 1352.2 +35.2 | $0.145/M | 32% |
| Qwen3 32B | 1340.0 +23.0 | $0.130/M | 40% |
| GPT-5 Nano | 1319.7 +2.7 | $0.138/M | 36% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | reasoning |
| Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 | 1383.6 | $0.084/M | reasoning |
| Gemma 3 27B | 1357.7 | $0.172/M | reasoning |
| Gemma 3 12B | 1334.2 | $0.075/M | reasoning |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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