Llama 3.1 8B Instruct API Pricing
Meta · context window 131K · prices updated 2026-09-20
Where Llama 3.1 8B Instruct sits on price
At $0.08 per million output tokens, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is a budget tier model — 25.0× cheaper than the median output price of $2.00, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It is the cheapest of the 8 Meta models we track. Output is only 1.6× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
Cached input is 50% cheaper. On an input-heavy workload you need roughly a 50% cache-hit rate to take 25% off the input line — reachable for chatbots and agents that resend the same system prompt and history.
What real workloads cost on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.08/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill. | $0 | $130 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0 | $1.11 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0002 | $57.00 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Llama 3.1 8B Instruct with caching and batch options.
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct price history
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 49 days of stability in a market where 79 of the 335 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 4 of Meta's own 8 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct vs DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 (DeepSeek) — priced within a rounding error on output, with $0.01 less per million input tokens. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Meta models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Llama 3.1 8B Instruct API cost?
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct costs $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.08 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.025 per million (50% cheaper). That works out to roughly 12,500,000 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0 per request and $130 per month on Llama 3.1 8B Instruct. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Llama 3.1 8B Instruct's 131K context window?
Sending 131K of input in a single request costs $0.0066 at $0.05 per million tokens — before any output. With prompt caching that same fill drops to about $0.0033 on repeat requests. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Llama 3.1 8B Instruct worth the price?
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 99% of the models we track. At this price the question is not cost but capability: it is a good fit for classification, extraction, routing and bulk summarisation, and a poor fit for multi-step reasoning where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens saved.