Compact open Llama model for lightweight chat, drafting, and self-hosting
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct by meta is offered by 15 providers on this page. Public prices are shown for 14 of them. Its reference price is $0.15 per 1M input tokens and $0.45 per 1M output tokens. The lowest paid channel is Kilo Gateway at $0.02 / $0.04 per 1M, about 11× 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.
The context window is 131,072 tokens at the reference host, but hosts report different limits, from 16,000 to 131,072, so the usable window depends on the provider you pick. It supports tool use and structured output. 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 2023-12.
| Provider | Tier | Input | Output | Cache read | Cache write | Context | Output limit | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nvidia | Cloud | Free | — | — | 16,000 ⚠ | 4,096 | deprecated | |
| Kilo Gateway | Gateway | $0.02 | $0.04 | — | — | 131,072 | 117,964 | |
| Inference | Gateway | $0.025 | $0.025 | — | — | 16,000 ⚠ | 4,096 | |
| Helicone | Gateway | $0.02 | $0.05 | — | — | 16,384 ⚠ | 16,384 | |
| Abacus meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | Gateway | $0.02 | $0.05 | — | — | 128,000 ⚠ | 4,096 | |
| NovitaAI | Gateway | $0.02 | $0.05 | — | — | 16,384 ⚠ | 16,384 | |
| OpenRouter | Gateway | $0.05 | $0.08 | $0.025 | — | 131,072 | 117,964 | |
| Hugging Face meta-llama/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct | Cloud | $0.06 | $0.06 | — | — | 131,072 | 4,096 | |
| NanoGPT | Gateway | $0.054 | $0.085 | $0.027 | — | 131,072 | 16,384 | |
| Cortecs | Gateway | $0.17 | $0.17 | — | — | 128,000 ⚠ | 128,000 | |
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.