The right tool for cheap, fast, high-volume tasks — not for anything that requires serious thinking.
High-throughput applications where cost and speed matter more than frontier-level quality, such as chatbots, content classification, and text summarization.
Extremely low cost at $0.02/$0.05 per 1M tokens — among the cheapest viable instruct models available
Fast inference speed due to small parameter count, ideal for real-time applications
Open-weight model allows self-hosting and fine-tuning for custom use cases
Solid instruction-following and chat performance for a sub-10B model
Limited 16K context window falls significantly behind competitors like Gemini 3.1 Pro (1M+) and Claude Sonnet 4.6 (200K)
See what Meta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct actually costs at your usage level
Based on Meta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct API pricing: $0.02/1M input · $0.049999999999999996/1M output. Real costs vary by provider discounts and caching. Check the provider for exact current rates.
Price History
→0% since May 9
4 data points · tracked daily since May 9, 2026
High-throughput applications where cost and speed matter more than frontier-level quality, such as chatbots, content classification, and text summarization.. Start free — no card required.
Recommendations are made independently based on real-world use and public benchmarks. See our disclosures for details.
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Llama 3 8B Instruct is Meta's compact open-weight instruction-following model, optimized for efficiency and accessibility at extremely low cost. It handles everyday text tasks like summarization, Q&A, and light coding at a fraction of the price of frontier models.
Pricing moves, ranking shifts, and capability updates.
Meta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Meta) is now indexed. The right tool for cheap, fast, high-volume tasks — not for anything that requires serious thinking.
View modelMeta: Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is best for high-throughput applications where cost and speed matter more than frontier-level quality, such as chatbots, content classification, and text summarization.. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
You need deep reasoning, long document analysis, complex code generation, or outputs where quality directly impacts user trust.
Meta: Llama 3 8B Instruct is the lower-cost option to compare first when you want a similar workflow fit with less token spend.
Meta: Llama 3 70B Instruct is the better pick when response time matters more than maximum depth or premium quality.
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You need deep reasoning, long document analysis, complex code generation, or outputs where quality directly impacts user trust.
Noticeably weaker on complex multi-step reasoning and nuanced writing compared to flagship models
Struggles with advanced coding tasks, especially those requiring deep logic or large codebases
Meta's Llama 3 70B Instruct is a 70-billion parameter open-weight language model fine-tuned for instruction following, representing Meta's most capable publicly available model at the time of release. It excels at general reasoning, coding assistance, and structured text tasks with strong multilingual support.
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.
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