Llama 3.1 8B Instruct API Pricing
Meta · Budget · Llama 3.x · released 2024-07. Prices in USD per 1 million tokens. Data snapshot: 2026-10-02.
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct has held the same list price since 2026-08-19 and is the 4th cheapest of 145 Budget models. Buying from DeepInfra rather than at the rate quoted here lowers the token price by about 52%, for a quantized fp8 build. It is rated a stable release but does not meet all four criteria of the FinOps Friendly badge.
- Input: $0.05 per 1M tokens
- Output: $0.08 per 1M tokens
- Batch API (input/output): not published
- Prompt-cache read: $0.03
- Context window: 131K
- Arena ELO: 1211 (as of 2026-09-25)
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct market position
On blended price ($0.071 per 1M tokens at 30% input, 70% output) it is cheaper than 97% of Budget models: 4th cheapest of 145, tied with one other. Across every category it is cheaper than 99% of priced text models in the catalogue: 4th cheapest of 285, tied with one other. Its Arena ELO of 1211 ranks 68th of the 68 models that carry one, above 0% of them.
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct licence, size and capabilities
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is open weights, which is not the same as open source: the weights are published, but under Llama 3.x, a licence that restricts some uses. Read it before self-hosting commercially. Its published size is 8B parameters. Listed capabilities: Text, Agents. Filling its 131K context window once costs $0.0066 in input tokens at list price.
Monthly cost at 100K requests, by business use case
From the after-discounts figure (prompt caching on the cached input share, batch API for async workloads, only where the provider publishes those rates), which assumes you implement both, to the list price. One figure means no discount is published.
| Use case | Tokens (in/out) | Monthly (after discounts – list) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Ticket | 1,500 / 500 | $9 – $12 |
| Knowledge Q&A | 2,000 / 800 | $13 – $16 |
| Meeting Summary | 10,000 / 1,200 | $57 – $60 |
| Marketing Content | 2,500 / 1,800 | $26 – $27 |
| Coding Task | 3,000 / 2,000 | $27 – $31 |
| Invoice Processing | 1,500 / 600 | $11 – $12 |
| Call Summary | 2,000 / 700 | $15 – $16 |
| Agent Workflow | 6,000 / 3,000 | $44 – $54 |
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct pricing by host
A host is a company that runs the model and sells it by the token — the lab that made it, a cloud platform like Amazon Bedrock, Azure or Vertex, or an independent provider. One model, several sellers, and often several prices. This model is sold by 5 different hosts. The price quoted above is the one we publish so that models stay comparable; it is not necessarily the cheapest way to buy this model. List prices as published on 2026-10-02 via OpenRouter — negotiated rates, committed-use discounts and provisioned capacity are not shown. These hosts do not all serve the model at the same numeric precision, so the cheapest is not a like-for-like substitute for the dearest.
Cheapest host: DeepInfra at $0.02 input / $0.04 output per 1M tokens, 52% below the price we publish on a blended basis (30% input, 70% output). It serves a quantized fp8 build, which is not the same product as the full-precision model. The dearest, Cloudflare, charges 7.3x the cheapest.
| Host | Input $/1M | Output $/1M |
|---|---|---|
| DeepInfra — fp8 | $0.02 | $0.04 |
| Novita — fp8 | $0.02 | $0.05 |
| Groq (the price shown above) | $0.05 | $0.08 |
| CoreWeave — bf16 | $0.22 | $0.22 |
| Cloudflare — fp8 | $0.15 | $0.29 |
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct price history
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct entered our daily price archive on 2026-08-19, 2026-08-15 being the first day we tracked any model. It listed at $0.05 input / $0.08 output per 1M tokens that day. No list price change since 2026-08-19. Last checked against the 2026-10-02 snapshot.
Alternatives to Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
- Next cheaper Budget model: Ling 3.0 Flash (inclusionai) at $0.050 blended, 29% less.
- Next more expensive: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 (DeepSeek) at $0.071 blended, 1% more.
The nearest Budget models on Arena ELO, each with its blended price and score difference against Llama 3.1 8B Instruct.
- Phi 4 (Microsoft) — $0.07 in / $0.14 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1256: 68% more expensive, 45 ELO points higher
- Gemma 2 27B (Google) — $0.65 in / $0.65 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1289: 815% more expensive, 78 ELO points higher
- Llama 3.1 70B Instruct (Meta) — $0.40 in / $0.40 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1293: 463% more expensive, 82 ELO points higher
- Llama 3.3 70B Instruct (Meta) — $0.10 in / $0.32 out per 1M, Arena ELO 1318: 258% more expensive, 107 ELO points higher
- Highest Arena ELO within 20% of this price: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 (DeepSeek), 1% more expensive, 225 ELO points higher, out of 2 models in that price band.
Common questions about Llama 3.1 8B Instruct pricing
- How much does Llama 3.1 8B Instruct cost?
- Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens on the API.
- Does Llama 3.1 8B Instruct offer batch or cached pricing?
- Prompt-cache reads cost $0.03/M input tokens. No batch pricing is published.
- What would Llama 3.1 8B Instruct cost per month?
- For a support-ticket workload (1,500 input + 500 output tokens per request) at 100K requests/month, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs about $12 at list prices.
- Has the price of Llama 3.1 8B Instruct changed?
- Llama 3.1 8B Instruct entered our daily price archive on 2026-08-19, 2026-08-15 being the first day we tracked any model. It listed at $0.05 input / $0.08 output per 1M tokens that day. No list price change since 2026-08-19. Last checked against the 2026-10-02 snapshot.
These are list prices: real cost also depends on caching, batching, negotiated discounts, marketplace agreements, and existing contracts. Get a FinOps review from OptimNow or compare all models.
Build the business case for Llama 3.1 8B Instruct in the AI ROI Calculator: add your business value on top of these costs to get ROI, break-even and payback.
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