How much does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning cost per million tokens?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs $0.059 per million input tokens and $0.17 per million output tokens at list price, and $0.03 per million cached input tokens.

What is the context window of Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts up to 262,144 tokens of context and returns up to 131,072 output tokens.

How much do 1,000 chat messages cost with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

About $0.14, assuming 1,000 input + 500 output tokens per message.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?

In the same price range, Qwen Qwen3.7 Flash ($0.03 / $0.13), DeepSeek DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423 ($0.042 / $0.084), OpenAI gpt-oss-120b ($0.037 / $0.17) cost less per token. Quality differs: test on your own prompts.

Where can I buy NVIDIA API credits for less?

Discount credit books resell OpenRouter usage below face value within their depth, OpenRouter adds a 5.5% card fee, and NVIDIA sells its own credits at face value. The live table on this page ranks them for $100 of usage.

NVIDIA · live price

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning API pricing

NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is an open mixture-of-experts model from NVIDIA, with 3B active parameters out of 30B total. It is suited for high-throughput agentic workloads and specialized tasks that...

Small and cheap (under $1 per 1M)Tool callingReasoning

Input: $0.059; per 1M tokens
Output: $0.17; per 1M tokens
Cached input: $0.03; per 1M tokens
Context: 262K; 131K max output

List price from OpenRouter, which passes NVIDIA's price through without markup. Refreshed hourly. Released August 11, 2026. Model id nvidia/nemotron-3.5-lightning.

What Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs in practice

At list price, before any batch or caching discount.

1,000 chat messages

$0.14

1,000 input + 500 output tokens each

1,000 RAG questions

$0.56

8,000 input + 500 output tokens each

100 coding-agent steps

$0.21

30,000 input + 2,000 output tokens each, no caching

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning price history

No price change since we started tracking on 2026-10-01. We record prices daily; changes will show here.

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning price by host

Darkbloom serves it below list price right now. Route to it to pay less on every token.

Darkbloom$0.039 in · $0.18 out · 262K ctx · 99.0% uptime 24h
DeepInfra$0.06 in · $0.16 out · 262K ctx · 99.9% uptime 24h
Io Net$0.059 in · $0.17 out · 262K ctx · 91.8% uptime 24h
Phala$0.07 in · $0.2 out · 262K ctx · 95.5% uptime 24h
CoreWeave$0.07 in · $0.2 out · 262K ctx · 100.0% uptime 24h

Where to buy NVIDIA credits for less

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning costs the same per token everywhere it's sold through OpenRouter. What changes is the price of the credits. Live quotes for $100 of usage:

#	Where you buy	You payYou pay for $100.00 of usage	vs list price	Price source
1	OrbioCardCheapest right now Credits from a discount book, plus a 5% platform fee and card processing, both included in the quote.	$85.10 incl. $2.60 card processing	-14.9%	live quote
2	smaaartCard Credits from a discount book, plus a 5% platform fee on face value. Card processing and taxes shown at checkout.	$95.00 + card processing and tax at checkout (not in this number)	-5.0%	live quote
3	Direct from the labCard Prepaid credits at face value (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google…). Taxes may apply.	$100.00 no top-up fee	list price	face value
4	OpenRouterCrypto 5% on crypto purchases. No markup on model prices.	$105.00 fees included	+5.0%	published fee
5	OpenRouterCard 5.5% on card purchases, $0.80 minimum. No markup on model prices.	$105.50 fees included	+5.5%	published fee

Disclosure: this site is run by the team behind smaaart, one of the options compared. Tables are ranked by price only, from live quotes and published fees, including when smaaart isn't first. How we compare

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning cost calculator

Enter your monthly tokens to price your own usage.

Model$0.059 in / $0.17 out per 1M tokens · list price, liveInput tokens / month (millions)Output tokens / month (millions)

Usage at list price$4.67/ month(quotes below are for $5.00: purchases run from $5.00 to $10,000.00)

Cheaper alternatives to Nemotron 3.5 Lightning

Other labs' models in the same price range or the one below, cheaper per token.

Model	Input / 1M	Output / 1M	Blended 3:1	Context
Qwen: Qwen3.7 Flash	$0.03	$0.13	$0.055	1M
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4 Flash 0423	$0.042	$0.084	$0.052	1.0M
OpenAI: gpt-oss-120b	$0.037	$0.17	$0.07	131K
OpenAI: gpt-oss-20b	$0.018	$0.09	$0.036	131K
Qwen: Qwen3 30B A3B Instruct 2507	$0.048	$0.193	$0.084	262K
Google: Gemma 3 4B	$0.05	$0.1	$0.063	131K

Other NVIDIA models

Model	Input / 1M	Output / 1M	Blended 3:1	Context
Nemotron 3.5 Content Safety	$0.2	$0.2	$0.2	131K
Nemotron 3 Ultra	$0.6	$2.40	$1.05	262K
Nemotron 3 Super	$0.08	$0.45	$0.172	262K
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B	$0.05	$0.2	$0.087	262K

All NVIDIA API prices