Gemma 3 12B Instruct

The 12B instruction-tuned model in Google's open-weight Gemma 3 family, sized to run on a single consumer GPU.

Params: 12.2B
Context: 128K tokens
Max output: 128K
Cutoff: Aug 2024
Released: Mar 2025
License: Gemma Terms of Use

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Hosted API price

Cheapest via Novita · per 1M tokens

USD

Input: $0.05 /1M
Output: $0.10 /1M
Hosted by: 2 providers

Hosted API pricing

How we price

Order

Providers are listed cheapest input rate first, then by output rate, a tie going to the creator's own listing. A provider that lists the model without a published rate sits at the end.

Prices

Base-tier, on-demand rates in USD per 1M tokens, converted at ECB reference rates where a provider publishes in another currency. Cached-input and batch rates show only where a provider publishes them. "Cheapest" marks the one provider with the lowest input and output pair; a tie wears no badge.

Cost

Input rate times the input tokens plus output rate times the output tokens, at the monthly volume set above the table. Cached-input, batch, long-context and reasoning-token billing are not modelled.

Transparency and funding

Affiliates: Affiliate links are marked. We may earn a commission if you click them, but commissions never affect the order.

Every provider serving Gemma 3 12B Instruct, cheapest input first. Set your monthly volume to see what each would bill.

Input M Output M

Every provider serving Gemma 3 12B Instruct, with its price per 1M input and output tokens and what the volume above would cost
Provider	Input /1M	Output /1M	Cost at 10M in + 2M out	Link
Novita	$0.05	$0.10	$0.70	Visit website
Google Cloud Creator	Open weights, no hosted price			Visit website

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

Gemma 3 12B Instruct needs about 10 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 1× RTX 4060 Ti at about $94 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 2B tokens a month on Novita's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Fits on 1 Single node ≤ 8

What it costs to self-host Gemma 3 12B Instruct at each precision: the memory it needs, the cheapest rental that holds it, that rental's month and the API volume it pays off at
Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 128K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bit INT4 / FP4	10 GB13 GB	1× RTX 4060 Ti	$94$94	2B tokens /mo2B tokens /mo
8-bit FP8 / INT8	16 GB18 GB	2× RTX 3060	$115$187	2B tokens /mo3B tokens /mo
16-bit FP16 / BF16	29 GB35 GB	2× RTX 4060 Ti	$187$230	3B 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. Pricing methodology.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Gemma 3 12B Instruct by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Models priced nearest Gemma 3 12B Instruct per 1M tokens, each at its cheapest provider
Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Gemma 3 12B Instruct
DeepSeek OCR-2 DeepSeek	$0.03	$0.03	$0.03	8K		−49%
Qwen3.7-Flash Alibaba Cloud	$0.0467	$0.03	$0.13	1M		−20%
GPT-OSS-20B OpenAI	$0.0483	$0.03	$0.14	131K	Jun 2024	−17%
Llama 3.2 1B Meta	$0.056	$0.027	$0.201	128K	Dec 2023	−4%
Command R7B Cohere	$0.0583	$0.04	$0.15	128K		0%
Gemma 3 12B Instruct This model Google Cloud	$0.0583	$0.05	$0.10	128K	Aug 2024
GPT-OSS-120B OpenAI	$0.0628	$0.039	$0.182	131K	Jun 2024	+8%
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B Nvidia	$0.075	$0.05	$0.20	262K	Jun 2025	+29%
Llama 3 8B Meta	$0.0833	$0.05	$0.25	8K	Mar 2023	+43%
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.0917	$0.06	$0.25	262K		+57%
Llama 3.2 3B Meta	$0.0983	$0.051	$0.335	128K	Dec 2023	+69%

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.

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Capabilities

What Gemma 3 12B Instruct accepts and can do, as published by Google Cloud.

Text Accepts and generates natural-language text.
Image Accepts images as input alongside text.
Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems.

Common questions

What is Gemma 3 12B Instruct good for?

Question answering, summarising and image understanding on your own hardware. Open weights under the Gemma Terms of Use, small enough for a single consumer GPU.

When is Gemma 3 12B Instruct not a good fit?

Video or audio input, and structured output. The Gemma Terms of Use are a custom license rather than Apache 2.0, and the Gemma 4 family knows more recent events.

What is the cheapest way to run Gemma 3 12B Instruct?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Novita charges $0.05 in / $0.10 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 4060 Ti at $94 a month, which costs the same as about 2B tokens a month on that API.

Can I self-host Gemma 3 12B Instruct?

Yes. The weights are released under the Gemma Terms of Use. At 4-bit it needs about 10 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $94 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.