Llama Guard 4 12B pricing and routing profile
Llama Guard 4 12B from Meta lists at $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens, with a 163,840-token context window. Prices from OpenRouter's catalogue on 2026-09-28.
Cost per 1,000 requests
| Request shape | List cost |
|---|---|
| Classification or routing (600 tokens in, 10 out) | $0.11 |
| Chat reply (2,000 in, 400 out) | $0.432 |
| Retrieval-augmented answer (8,000 in, 500 out) | $1.53 |
Before prompt caching. Try your own shape in the cost calculator.
Can Gimbix route to it first?
Not as a first-answer model through OpenRouter: no host returns token log probabilities for Llama Guard 4 12B. It can still be the model Gimbix falls back to when a cheaper model is unsure.
Cheaper models that can answer first
Models priced below Llama Guard 4 12B that expose a confidence signal. Whether they answer your traffic as well is what a Gimbix pilot measures.
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Cheaper on a chat reply |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.5-9B | $0.10 / $0.15 | 40% |
| Llama 3.1 8B Instruct | $0.05 / $0.08 | 69% |
| Qwen3.7 Flash | $0.03 / $0.13 | 74% |
| Granite 4.0 Micro | $0.017 / $0.112 | 82% |
| gpt-oss-20b | $0.018 / $0.09 | 83% |
| Ling 3.0 Flash | $0.021 / $0.063 | 84% |
Questions
How much does Llama Guard 4 12B cost?
Llama Guard 4 12B lists at $0.18 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens on OpenRouter as of 2026-09-28. A typical chat reply of 2,000 input and 400 output tokens costs about $0.432 per 1,000 requests.
What is the context window of Llama Guard 4 12B?
163,840 tokens.
Can a cheaper model replace Llama Guard 4 12B?
Sometimes. Gimbix proves it on your own traffic before routing: the cheaper model must match Llama Guard 4 12B on one half of your requests and make at most three answers worse on the other.