As of August 25, 2026, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is 93% cheaper per million tokens than Grok-3 Mini. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus Llama 3.1 8B Instruct at $0.03 / $0.03. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://llama.meta.com/
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); Meta pricing (https://llama.meta.com/)
Grok-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Meta
Input
$0.03
Output
$0.03
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Each bar is share of the current leader on that eval. Click a row to open the board.
AIME 2025. Left is cheaper. Up is a higher score. The line is the best score you can buy at each price.
Grok-3 MiniLlama 3.1 8B InstructVerdict
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct offers significantly lower pricing, while Grok-3 Mini leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 25, 2026, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is 93% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs $0.03 per million input tokens and $0.03 per million output tokens ($0.06 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 / $0.50 per million tokens ($0.80 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://llama.meta.com/. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct Meta API pricing is $0.03 input and $0.03 output per million tokens via Meta. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
Grok-3 Mini has a published LiveCodeBench score of 80.4%. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while Llama 3.1 8B Instruct supports 131K tokens. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Grok-3 Mini leads on 4 of 4 shared benchmarks versus Llama 3.1 8B Instruct's 0 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Grok-3 Mini and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Grok-3 Mini through xAI and Llama 3.1 8B Instruct through Meta with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published xAI API pricing and Meta API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://llama.meta.com/. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Grok-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while Llama 3.1 8B Instruct supports up to 131K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok-3 Mini runs at approximately 100 tokens/second while Llama 3.1 8B Instruct runs at 42 tokens/second. Grok-3 Mini is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Grok-3 Mini or Llama 3.1 8B Instruct from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs $0.03/M input and $0.03/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
The index
280 models across 33 providers. Search or jump to a lab — every model page stays linked here.
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