Qwen 3.6 is ~$2/m tok, 3.8 should be drop in replacement. Gemma 31B is $0.34/m tok. The price differential on these models is massive on openrouter.

Yeah, I would appreciate if someone could make sense of the pricing differences between these models. How can a provider run DSv4F at lower cost than a 27B dense or 35B A3B model?

Does it come down to utilization and/or specific model tricks and efficiencies (attention, kv cache, etc.)?

DeepInfra prices:

Qwen 3.6 27B: $0.32 in / $3.20 out

Gemma 3 27B: $0.08 in / $0.16 out

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731: $0.08 in / $0.18 out

Qwen 3.6 35B A3B: $0.10 in / $0.95 out

https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-27b

https://openrouter.ai/google/gemma-3-27b-it

https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-35b-a3b

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731

DeepSeek V4 Flash is natively FP4 MoE with very compact KV cache. Say 8 GB/s. Qwen 27B is about 60 GB/s at full FP16 precision.

If active weight bandwidth is everything, then wouldn't Qwen 35b a3b (FP8) be roughly half the cost of dsv4f (FP4)?

dsv4f appears bigger and more memory/computationally expensive to run any way I look at it.

Where do you see that? From what I can see on Open Router, Qwen 3.6 27B (the closest dense equivalent to Gemma 31) is $0.28/m. Am I missing something?

https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-27b

They're comparing Qwen 3.8 Max to Gemma 31B, fundamental mistake.

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Why are you comparing a 2.4 trillion Max model to a 31 billion model?