What is Llama 3 8B good for?

Small text-only tasks such as classification, short chat and extraction. Open weights under the Meta Llama 3 Community License, small enough for a single consumer GPU.

When is Llama 3 8B not a good fit?

Image input and tool calling, which it has neither of, and anything needing recent knowledge. Llama 3.1 8B takes far longer inputs and adds function calling under a similar licence.

What is the cheapest way to run Llama 3 8B?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Replicate charges $0.05 in / $0.25 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 3060 at $43 a month, which costs the same as about 518M tokens a month on that API.

How does Llama 3 8B compare with Llama 3.1 8B?

Meta says Llama 3.1 8B upgrades Llama 3 8B with more and better training data and a new multi-round post-training, adding a much longer context, multilingual support, tool use and what Meta calls stronger reasoning. Same text input. Llama 3 8B costs 150% more per 1M input tokens and 400% more per 1M output tokens than Llama 3.1 8B, at each model's cheapest listed provider. It came out 3 months earlier, has an older knowledge cutoff (March 2023 against December 2023) and a smaller context (8K against 131K tokens) and is licensed under Meta Llama 3 Community License against Llama 3.1 Community License.

Can I self-host Llama 3 8B?

Yes. The weights are released under the Meta Llama 3 Community License. At 4-bit it needs about 7 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $43 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

Open weights · Meta Llama 3 Community License

Llama 3 8B

Meta's 8B-parameter open-weight Llama 3 model, released April 2024.

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Cheapest via Replicate

Input: $0.05 /1M tokens
Output: $0.25 /1M tokens

3 providers

Key Specifications

Context window: 8K tokens
Knowledge cutoff: Mar 2023
Released: Apr 2024
Parameters: 8B
Inputs: Text

Hosted API pricing

Input tokens M Output tokens M

Provider	Input /1M tokens	Output /1M tokens	Cost at 10M in + 2M out
Replicate Cheapest	$0.05	$0.25	$1.00	View
Together AI	$0.14	$0.14	$1.68	View
Meta Creator	Open weights, no hosted price			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

Llama 3 8B needs about 7 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with its full 8K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 1× RTX 3060 at about $43 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 518M tokens a month on Replicate's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Fits on 1 Single node ≤ 8

Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (Full 8K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bitINT4 / FP4	7 GB	1× RTX 3060	$43	518M tokens /mo
8-bitFP8 / INT8	11 GB	1× RTX 4070	$72	864M tokens /mo
16-bitFP16 / BF16	19 GB	2× RTX 3060	$86	1B 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 Llama 3 8B by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Llama 3 8B
Command R7B Cohere	$0.0583	$0.04	$0.15	128K		−30%
Gemma 3 12B Instruct Google Cloud	$0.0583	$0.05	$0.10	128K	Aug 2024	−30%
Llama 3.2 1B Meta	$0.0583	$0.03	$0.20	128K	Dec 2023	−30%
GPT-OSS-120B OpenAI	$0.0633	$0.04	$0.18	131K	Jun 2024	−24%
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B Nvidia	$0.075	$0.05	$0.20	262K	Jun 2025	−10%
Llama 3 8B This model Meta	$0.0833	$0.05	$0.25	8K	Mar 2023
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.0917	$0.06	$0.25	262K		+10%
Llama 3.2 3B Meta	$0.0983	$0.05	$0.34	128K	Dec 2023	+18%
Qwen3-30B-A3B FP8 Alibaba Cloud	$0.0983	$0.05	$0.34	33K		+18%
Ministral 3 3B Mistral	$0.10	$0.10	$0.10	256K		+20%
GLM-5.3-Flash Z.AI	$0.1083	$0.08	$0.25	1M		+30%

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.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Llama 3 8B good for?: Small text-only tasks such as classification, short chat and extraction. Open weights under the Meta Llama 3 Community License, small enough for a single consumer GPU.
When is Llama 3 8B not a good fit?: Image input and tool calling, which it has neither of, and anything needing recent knowledge. Llama 3.1 8B takes far longer inputs and adds function calling under a similar licence.
What is the cheapest way to run Llama 3 8B?: Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Replicate charges $0.05 in / $0.25 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 1x RTX 3060 at $43 a month, which costs the same as about 518M tokens a month on that API.
How does Llama 3 8B compare with Llama 3.1 8B?: Meta says Llama 3.1 8B upgrades Llama 3 8B with more and better training data and a new multi-round post-training, adding a much longer context, multilingual support, tool use and what Meta calls stronger reasoning. Same text input. Llama 3 8B costs 150% more per 1M input tokens and 400% more per 1M output tokens than Llama 3.1 8B, at each model's cheapest listed provider. It came out 3 months earlier, has an older knowledge cutoff (March 2023 against December 2023) and a smaller context (8K against 131K tokens) and is licensed under Meta Llama 3 Community License against Llama 3.1 Community License.
Can I self-host Llama 3 8B?: Yes. The weights are released under the Meta Llama 3 Community License. At 4-bit it needs about 7 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $43 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.

More from Meta

Model	Context	Cutoff	Input /1M	Output /1M
Llama 3.2 3B Open weights	128K	Dec 2023	$0.05	$0.34
Llama 3.2 1B Open weights	128K	Dec 2023	$0.03	$0.20
Llama 3.2 11B Vision Open weights	128K	Dec 2023	$0.05	$0.68
Llama 3.3 70B Open weights	128K	Dec 2023	$0.13	$0.40
Llama 4 Scout Open weights	10M	Aug 2024	$0.16	$0.64
Llama 3.1 8B Open weights	131K	Dec 2023	$0.02	$0.05
Llama 4 Maverick Open weights	1M	Aug 2024	$0.20	$0.70
Muse Glimmer 30B Open weights	131K	Jan 2026	$0.20	$0.80