Extremely low cost at $0.02/$0.06 per 1M tokens makes it viable for high-volume moderation tasks
Purpose-trained on MLCommons hazard taxonomy with strong classification accuracy for harmful content categories
128K context window allows screening of long conversations or documents in a single pass
Fast inference due to compact 8B parameter size, enabling real-time moderation with low latency
Weaknesses
Not a general-purpose model — cannot generate text, answer questions, or assist with coding or writing tasks
May produce false positives or miss nuanced edge cases compared to more sophisticated safety systems like Anthropic's Constitutional AI classifiers
Limited to safety classification use cases; deploying it outside moderation pipelines offers no value
Monthly cost estimate
See what Llama Guard 3 8B actually costs at your usage level
Input tokens / month1M
10k50M
Output tokens / month500k
10k25M
Input cost
$0.020
Output cost
$0.030
Total / month
$0.050
Based on Llama Guard 3 8B API pricing: $0.02/1M input · $0.06/1M output. Real costs vary by provider discounts and caching. Check the provider for exact current rates.
Price History
Llama Guard 3 8B pricing over time
→0% since Mar 27
2 data points · tracked daily since Mar 27, 2026
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Automated content safety screening and moderation for AI application pipelines at minimal cost.. Start free — no card required.
Meta's Llama 3.1 70B Instruct is a open-weight large language model with 70 billion parameters, fine-tuned for instruction following across coding, reasoning, and general-purpose tasks. It offers a strong balance of capability and cost at $0.40/1M tokens for both input and output.
Verdict
The go-to budget open-weight model for teams who need solid LLM capability without frontier model pricing.
Quality score
65%
Pricing
$0.40/1M in
$0.40/1M out
Speed
Fast
Best for teams needing capable open-weight llm performance at budget pricing for coding assistance, summarization, or rag pipelines.
Context
131k tokens
Pricing shown is via third-party API providers (e.g., OpenRouter, Together AI) — costs may vary. Meta releases Llama 3.1 weights publicly, enabling self-hosting at even lower cost. Not available directly from Meta as a hosted API.
Pricing moves, ranking shifts, and capability updates.
New ModelMar 27, 2026
Llama Guard 3 8B — added to UseRightAI
Llama Guard 3 8B (Meta) is now indexed. A hyper-specialized, ultra-cheap safety classifier — indispensable in the right pipeline, useless outside of it.
Llama Guard 3 8B is best for automated content safety screening and moderation for ai application pipelines at minimal cost.. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
When should I avoid Llama Guard 3 8B?
You need a general-purpose AI assistant for coding, writing, research, or any task beyond binary or categorical content safety classification.
What is a cheaper alternative to Llama Guard 3 8B?
Llama 4 Maverick is the lower-cost option to compare first when you want a similar workflow fit with less token spend.
What is a faster alternative to Llama Guard 3 8B?
Llama 4 Scout is the better pick when response time matters more than maximum depth or premium quality.
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