Is Solar Pro 4 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats Solar Pro 4 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, Solar Pro 4 is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 scores 54.5 higher and costs 35% less, with a covering envelope. 13 of 136 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 is both better and cheaper than Solar Pro 4: 54.5 points higher on LMArena and 35% less per million tokens, $0.05 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1377.3
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.158/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1431.8
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.103/M
Solar Pro 4 takes text, returns up to 131,072 tokens from a 524,288-token context, and is listed by 2 sellers.
Compared against 136 rated, priced models on this lens: 1 model dominates it and gives up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. Solar Pro 4 scores 1377.3 at $0.16 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 Flash 0423 | 1431.8 +54.5 | $0.103/M | 35% |
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 | context, max output |
| Hy3 | 1440.6 | $0.144/M | context, max output |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 1434.5 | $0.143/M | context |
| Qwen3 235B A22B Instruct 2507 | 1419.8 | $0.153/M | context, reasoning |
| Step 3.5 Flash | 1403.7 | $0.150/M | context, max output |
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Saved decision references
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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