⚡Under $0.50/hr🧠VRAM Estimator⚖Compare GPUs🎁Free LLM APIs🎯Model Index
Open Research FoundationUnited StatesEst. 2004Community Open

Meta

Meta AI develops the Llama family of open-weight large language models under the Llama Community License. Llama 3.3 70B delivers GPT-4o-class performance at a fraction of the cost, while Llama 3.1 8B provides the most capable sub-10B open model. Meta's open-weight approach enables self-hosting on consumer GPUs and API deployment through third-party providers like Groq and Cerebras.

Why Choose Meta?

Llama 3.3 70B uses a dense transformer architecture with grouped-query attention (GQA) that reduces KV-cache memory by 8x compared to multi-head attention while maintaining quality. The model was pre-trained on 15 trillion tokens of publicly available data with a carefully curated quality filter pipeline. Meta's Llama 3.1 8B achieves competitive coding performance through a supervised fine-tuning dataset of 10 billion tokens including code from GitHub, Stack Overflow, and synthetic code generation. Their model card provides detailed benchmarks, training configurations, and safety evaluations, establishing a benchmark for model transparency in the open-weights ecosystem.

Pricing Overview

Meta Llama models are free to self-host under the Llama Community License. API access through Groq costs $0.88/M input/output for Llama 3.3 70B. No credit card is required for self-hosting. The most cost-effective way to run Llama 3.3 70B in production is through Groq's API at $0.88/M tokens with 30 RPM free access.

Official Model Portfolio (6)

MODELCONTEXTINPUT $/1MOUTPUT $/1MSPEEDFREE
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct128K$0.00$0.00500 tok/sYes
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct128K$0.01$0.01800 tok/sYes
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct128K$0.02$0.021,200 tok/sYes
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct128K$0.01$0.011,500 tok/sYes
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct128K$0.35$0.3590 tok/s—
Llama 3.1 405B Instruct128K$2.50$2.5014 tok/s—

⚡ Verified Free Tier & SDK Drop-In

✓ Verified Free TierVia Groq: 30 RPM / 14,400 RPD (no card). Via Cerebras: verified developer tier

Credit Card Required: No

🧠 Hardware Hosting Sizing

MODELFP16 VRAMINT4 VRAMMIN GPUCHEAPEST CLOUD
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct140 GB40 GBRTX 4090 24GBView Deals →
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct16 GB6 GBRTX 4090 24GBView Deals →
Llama 3.2 3B Instruct8 GB3 GBRTX 4060 8GBView Deals →
Llama 3.2 1B Instruct4 GB2 GBAny x86 CPUView Deals →
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct140 GB40 GBRTX 4090 24GBView Deals →
Llama 3.1 405B Instruct810 GB230 GB12x H100 80GBView Deals →

⚖️ Top 3 Competitor Alternatives

COMPANYTYPEFREE TIERFLAGSHIPLINK
Mistral AIEuropean Open & Commercial LabNomistral-nemo-12b, mistral-7b-v0.3View →
Alibaba QwenOpen Weights LeaderYesqwen-2.5-coder-32b, qwen-2.5-72bView →
DeepSeekOpen Weights & Frontier ResearchNodeepseek-r1, deepseek-v3View →
Company profiles sourced from official documentation and verified API documentation | Updated MonthlyMethodology →