Nemotron 3.5 Lightning API Pricing
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs $0.08 per 1M input tokens and $0.2 per 1M output tokens on US (Other)'s API. Prices are provider list prices in USD, refreshed as sources update; see the Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model profile for capability scores.
Price List
| Rate | Price (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $0.08 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $0.2 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended input + output | $0.28 | 1M in + 1M out at list price |
| Context window | 1M tokens |
What a Workload Costs
Computed straight from the list prices above — token counts are illustrative workload sizes, not measurements of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning.
| Workload | Cost | Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Short chat turn | $0.00018 | 1K in / 500 out |
| Summarize a long document | $0.00840 | 100K in / 2K out |
| Agentic coding session | $0.060 | 500K in / 100K out |
| 1M input + 1M output tokens | $0.280 | 1M in / 1M out |
Effective Cost
In AI IQ's scoring, Nemotron 3.5 Lightning's list price is adjusted by a token-usage multiplier of 1.173, giving an effective cost of $0.3284 per 1M input + output tokens. That places it #7 of 117 models on the effective-cost ranking (lower is cheaper). Some models spend far more tokens than others on the same task, so effective cost compares what a unit of work really costs. Method details are on the methodology page; see all models on the cost charts and the falling cost of intelligence over time.
Cheaper Alternatives at Similar Capability
Models with a lower effective cost that score within a few IQ points of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (IQ 95), or better.
| Model | Provider | IQ | Effective Cost / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-oss-20b | OpenAI | 100 | $0.1937 |
| gemma-4-12b | 98 | $0.2859 | |
| nemotron-3-nano | US (Other) | 96 | $0.2732 |
| gpt-5-nano | OpenAI | 96 | $0.303 |
| Qwen3.7 Flash | Alibaba | 92 | $0.2673 |