Llama 3.2 1B Instruct API Pricing
Meta · context window 60K · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where Llama 3.2 1B Instruct sits on price
At $0.201 per million output tokens, Llama 3.2 1B Instruct is a budget tier model — 10.3× cheaper than the median output price of $2.08, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It sits 3th cheapest of the 8 Meta models we track. Output costs 7.4× more than input here, so anything that makes the model write less — tighter instructions, structured output, lower max_tokens — moves the bill more than trimming the prompt.
What real workloads cost on Llama 3.2 1B Instruct
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.201/1M 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 | $88.92 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0 | $1.31 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0002 | $54.45 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Llama 3.2 1B Instruct with caching and batch options.
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct price history
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 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 3.2 1B Instruct vs Qwen2.5 7B Instruct
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Qwen2.5 7B Instruct (Alibaba (Qwen)) — priced within a rounding error on output, with $0.073 more 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 Qwen2.5 7B Instruct pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Meta models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Llama 3.2 1B Instruct API cost?
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct costs $0.027 per million input tokens and $0.201 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 4,975,124 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Llama 3.2 1B Instruct?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0 per request and $88.92 per month on Llama 3.2 1B Instruct. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Llama 3.2 1B Instruct's 60K context window?
Sending 60K of input in a single request costs $0.0016 at $0.027 per million tokens — before any output. There is no cached-input tier on this model, so every repeat of that context is billed at full price. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is Llama 3.2 1B Instruct worth the price?
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 91% 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.