Open multimodal Gemma instruction model for multilingual text generation and image understanding
Gemma 3 12B IT by google is offered by 12 providers on this page. Public prices are shown for 11 of them. Its reference price is $0.272 per 1M tokens. The lowest paid channel is NovitaAI at $0.05 / $0.10 per 1M, about 5.4× below the reference price. That channel is a third-party gateway, so confirm its availability and rate limits before depending on it. It also has 1 free ($0) channel; free tiers usually carry rate limits, and subscription-covered access bills $0 per token only after the subscription fee.
Artificial Analysis rates it 3.8 on the Intelligence Index, with 5.8 for coding and 0.1 for agentic tasks. Against its lowest blended price of $0.063 per 1M, that is roughly 61 index points per dollar, which is the value ratio the leaderboards rank on.
The context window is 131,072 tokens at the reference host, but hosts report different limits, from 128,000 to 131,072, so the usable window depends on the provider you pick. It supports tool use and structured output. Accepted input modalities are Text, Image, and PDF. The weights are open, so it can also be self-hosted or served through a gateway of your choice. Providers report the capability flags inconsistently, so verify a specific feature against the host you plan to use. Its training knowledge cuts off at 2024-08.
Quality is independently evaluated by Artificial Analysis. Speed/latency are model-level medians.
| Provider | Tier | Input | Output | Cache read | Cache write | Context | Output limit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | Cloud | Free | — | — | 131,072 | 16,384 | ||
| NovitaAI | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.10 | — | — | 131,072 | 8,192 | |
| Helicone | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.10 | — | — | 131,072 | 8,192 | |
| Deep Infra | Cloud | $0.05 | $0.15 | — | — | 131,072 | 131,072 | |
| Kilo Gateway | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.15 | — | — | 131,072 | 16,384 | |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.15 | — | — | 131,072 | 16,384 | |
| Hugging Face | Cloud | $0.05 | $0.15 | — | — | 131,072 | 131,072 | |
| Eden AI | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.15 | — | — | 131,072 | 131,072 | |
| Amazon Bedrock google.gemma-3-12b-it | Cloud | $0.09 | $0.29 | — | — | 131,072 | 8,192 | |
| Merge Gateway | Gateway | $0.09 | $0.29 | — | — | 128,000 ⚠ | 8,192 | |
| Neon gemma-3-12b | Cloud | $0.15 | $0.50 | — | — | 131,072 | 8,192 | |
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $0.27 | $0.27 | $0.14 | — | 131,072 | 16,384 |
Sorted by blended price (input×0.75 + output×0.25) asc. The official channel always shows regardless of rank. Whether a gateway's low price is actually usable can't be verified.
1 more channels offer $0 (Nvidia); free tiers usually have rate limits and no SLA, excluded from ranking.
Individual evaluations run by Artificial Analysis, on the same reasoning tier as the intelligence score above. Each benchmark has its own task set and harness, so rows are not comparable with one another. The Intelligence Index above draws on a different, newer set of evaluations.