Llama 4 API Cost Guide: Maverick vs Scout vs Self-Hosting
Meta Llama 4 pricing explained — Maverick vs Scout, hosted API vs self-hosting economics, and when Llama 3.1 8B is still the cheapest capable option.
Meta's Llama 4 represents a major leap in open-weight AI. Llama 4 Maverick and Scout are multimodal, capable of processing both text and images, and compete directly with GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet — at a fraction of the hosted API cost. This guide covers Llama 4 pricing, how it compares to proprietary models, and whether self-hosting makes sense for your workload.
Meta Llama Model Lineup
Llama 4 Maverick vs GPT-4o: Cost at Scale
Llama 4 Maverick is Meta's flagship model — multimodal, instruction-tuned, and priced significantly below GPT-4o for hosted API usage.
Llama 4 Scout: Efficiency-First
Scout is the smaller Llama 4 model optimized for speed and cost. It handles most instruction-following, summarization, and classification tasks well, and comes in cheaper than Maverick. For high-volume applications where Maverick-level capability isn't required, Scout is the better economic choice.
Self-Hosting vs API: Which Is Cheaper?
Because Llama models are open-weight (Apache 2.0 license), you can run them yourself — with zero per-token API costs. Here's how the economics break down:
Llama 3.1 8B: The Best Cheap Model?
Llama 3.1 8B remains one of the most cost-effective models available. At its price point, it beats most proprietary small models on standard benchmarks and is ideal for classification, extraction, and simple Q&A at massive scale.
Compare Meta models: Full Llama pricing → | Llama 4 Maverick vs Claude Sonnet →