Is Qwen3.5-35B-A3B a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Qwen3.5-35B-A3B 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, Qwen3.5-35B-A3B is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GLM 5.3 Flash scores 75.2 higher and costs 33% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GLM 5.3 Flash is both better and cheaper than Qwen3.5-35B-A3B: 75.2 points higher on LMArena and 33% less per million tokens, $0.118 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1394.4
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.355/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1469.6
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.238/M
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B takes text, image, video, returns up to 32,768 tokens from a 262,144-token context, and is listed by 7 sellers.
Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 5 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Qwen3.5-35B-A3B scores 1394.4 at $0.355 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 | 1469.6 +75.2 | $0.238/M | 33% |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 +62.0 | $0.175/M | 51% |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1433.9 +39.5 | $0.127/M | 64% |
| MiMo-V2.5 | 1427.5 +33.1 | $0.175/M | 51% |
| Qwen3.5-Flash | 1397.0 +2.6 | $0.114/M | 68% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 | $0.182/M | video |
| Gemma 4 31B | 1443.4 | $0.205/M | max output |
| Hy3 | 1440.7 | $0.231/M | image, video |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 | 1432.1 | $0.113/M | image, video |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | 1424.5 | $0.290/M | context, image, video |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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