What is DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B good for?

Reasoning work on a dense 70B model. MIT-licensed weights, far lighter to self-host than the 671B R1 it was distilled from, on a single high-memory GPU.

When is DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B not a good fit?

Tool use and image input: it has no function calling or structured output, and takes text only.

What is the cheapest way to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Novita charges $0.80 in / $0.80 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 4x RTX 4060 Ti at $317 a month, which costs the same as about 396M tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B?

Yes. The weights are MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 46 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $317 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

Open weights · MIT

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B

A 70B reasoning model distilled from DeepSeek R1 onto Llama 3.3 70B, with weights under the MIT license.

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Cheapest via Novita

Input: $0.80 /1M tokens
Output: $0.80 /1M tokens

1 provider

Key Specifications

Context window: 131K tokens
Max output: 33K tokens
Released: Jan 2025
Parameters: 70.6B
Inputs: Text

Capabilities Show details: Reasoning Thinks before it answers, always on or as a switchable mode.

Hosted API pricing

Input tokens M Output tokens M

Provider	Input /1M tokens	Output /1M tokens	Cost at 10M in + 2M out
Novita	$0.80	$0.80	$9.60	View

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B needs about 46 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 4× RTX 4060 Ti at about $317 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 396M tokens a month on Novita's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Single node ≤ 8

Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 131K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bitINT4 / FP4	46 GB84 GB	4× RTX 4060 Ti	$317$346	396M tokens /mo432M tokens /mo
8-bitFP8 / INT8	83 GB94 GB	8× RTX 3060	$346$634	432M tokens /mo792M tokens /mo
16-bitFP16 / BF16	154 GB186 GB	8× RTX 3090	$979$3,168	1B tokens /mo4B tokens /mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite Google Cloud	$0.6667	$0.30	$2.50	1M	Mar 2026	−17%
GPT-3.5 Turbo OpenAI	$0.6667	$0.50	$1.50	16K	Sep 2021	−17%
Mistral Large 3 Mistral	$0.6667	$0.50	$1.50	256K		−17%
Qwen3.5-Plus Alibaba Cloud	$0.7333	$0.40	$2.40	1M		−8%
GLM-5 Z.AI	$0.7667	$0.60	$1.60	200K		−4%
DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B This model DeepSeek	$0.80	$0.80	$0.80	131K
GLM-4.7 Z.AI	$0.8667	$0.60	$2.20	205K		+8%
Gemini 3 Flash Preview Google Cloud	$0.9167	$0.50	$3.00	1M	Jan 2025	+15%
Qwen3.6-Plus Alibaba Cloud	$0.9167	$0.50	$3.00	1M		+15%
GLM-5.2 Z.AI	$0.95	$0.70	$2.20	1M		+19%
Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B A55B Nvidia	$0.99	$0.66	$2.64	1M	Sep 2025	+24%

Prices are USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

Lium

Built for agents: CLI, SDK and MCP server. Your agent rents and runs GPUs itself.

A permissionless marketplace. 1000+ nodes from independent providers worldwide.

Hard to find nodes available; B200 and B300 Blackwell nodes listed now.

Consumer + DC grade cards for cheap. H100s from $1/hr, RTX 5090s from $0.35/hr.

View Pricing

Frequently Asked Questions

What is DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B good for?: Reasoning work on a dense 70B model. MIT-licensed weights, far lighter to self-host than the 671B R1 it was distilled from, on a single high-memory GPU.
When is DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B not a good fit?: Tool use and image input: it has no function calling or structured output, and takes text only.
What is the cheapest way to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B?: Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Novita charges $0.80 in / $0.80 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 4x RTX 4060 Ti at $317 a month, which costs the same as about 396M tokens a month on that API.
Can I self-host DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B?: Yes. The weights are MIT licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 46 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $317 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

More from DeepSeek

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DeepSeek V3 Turbo Open weights	64K	$0.40	$1.30
DeepSeek V4 Pro Open weights	1M	$0.45	$0.89
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Open weights	1M	$0.30	$1.20
DeepSeek V3 Open weights	128K	$0.27	$1.12
DeepSeek V3.1 Open weights	131K	$0.27	$1.00