Open-Source vs Proprietary LLMs
Llama 3.1 405B, DeepSeek V3, and Mistral Large vs the proprietary frontier (Claude Opus 4, GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro) — pricing, self-hosting, and quality trade-offs.
Comparing 6 models · Prices last verified
Verdict
Open-weight models close the quality gap further every quarter. For most production text tasks, Llama 3.1 405B and DeepSeek V3 deliver 80-95% of frontier quality at a fraction of the price — and crucially, with the option to self-host. Proprietary models still lead on multimodal, function calling reliability, and the very hardest reasoning.
Pricing Comparison
| Model | Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Context | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3.1 405B | Meta | $2.70 | $2.70 | 128K | flagship |
| DeepSeek V3 | DeepSeek | $0.270 | $1.10 | 64K | balanced |
| Mistral Large | Mistral | $2.00 | $6.00 | 128K | balanced |
| Claude Opus 4 | Anthropic | $15.00 | $75.00 | 200K | flagship |
| GPT-4o | OpenAI | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128K | balanced |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 | $10.00 | 1M | flagship |
Model Breakdown
Meta
$2.70
per 1M input
Llama 3.1 405B is Meta's largest open-weight model — competitive with GPT-4-class models on many benchmarks and uniquely available for self-hosting. Symmetric input/output pricing is common across hosted providers.
DeepSeek
$0.270
per 1M input
DeepSeek V3 is the general-purpose DeepSeek model — surprisingly strong on coding and math at a fraction of GPT-4o's price. Open-weight, with growing third-party host support.
Mistral
$2.00
per 1M input
Mistral Large is Mistral AI's flagship model — a strong open-weight competitor that offers competitive performance at a lower price than GPT-4o. Particularly strong at coding and European languages.
Anthropic
$15.00
per 1M input
Claude Opus 4 is Anthropic's most powerful model — built for complex reasoning, long-form analysis, and tasks that require deep context understanding. It excels at nuanced writing, research synthesis, and multi-step problem solving.
OpenAI
$2.50
per 1M input
GPT-4o is OpenAI's flagship multimodal model — capable of processing text, images, and audio. It's the default choice for most production OpenAI workloads, balancing cost, speed, and capability.
$1.25
per 1M input
Gemini 2.5 Pro is Google's most capable model, featuring a massive 1M token context window — the largest of any major model. It's particularly strong on reasoning, code, and tasks requiring long document understanding.
Our Verdict
Open-weight models close the quality gap further every quarter. For most production text tasks, Llama 3.1 405B and DeepSeek V3 deliver 80-95% of frontier quality at a fraction of the price — and crucially, with the option to self-host. Proprietary models still lead on multimodal, function calling reliability, and the very hardest reasoning.
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