Llama Guard 4 12B API Pricing
Meta · context window 164K · prices updated 2026-09-20
Where Llama Guard 4 12B sits on price
At $0.18 per million output tokens, Llama Guard 4 12B is a budget tier model — 11.1× cheaper than the median output price of $2.00, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It sits 2th cheapest of the 8 Meta models we track. Output is only 1.0× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
What real workloads cost on Llama Guard 4 12B
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.18/1M 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. | $0.0001 | $454 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0.0001 | $3.51 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0006 | $189 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads Llama Guard 4 12B with caching and batch options.
Llama Guard 4 12B price history
Llama Guard 4 12B'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 Guard 4 12B vs Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 (Alibaba (Qwen)) — 7% more expensive on output, with $0.1319 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 Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507 pricing →Cheaper alternatives
More Meta models
Frequently asked questions
› How much does the Llama Guard 4 12B API cost?
Llama Guard 4 12B costs $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 5,555,556 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on Llama Guard 4 12B?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0.0001 per request and $454 per month on Llama Guard 4 12B. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill Llama Guard 4 12B's 164K context window?
Sending 164K of input in a single request costs $0.0295 at $0.18 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 Guard 4 12B worth the price?
Llama Guard 4 12B is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 95% 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.