NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Poolside Laguna S 2.1
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Both cost about the same at a typical 3:1 input/output mix.
- Laguna S 2.1 accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning output costs $0.12 per 1M via Darkbloom, against the list price of $0.20.
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Laguna S 2.1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | NVIDIA | Poolside |
| Released | 2026-08-11 | 2026-07-21 |
| Input / 1M | $0.07 | $0.09 |
| Output / 1M | $0.20 | $0.18 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.04 | $0.0090 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.103 | $0.113 |
| Context | 262K | 1M |
| Max output | 236K | 131K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 4 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.12 | $0.18 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.93% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
$7.20 per month$0.24 per day
Laguna S 2.1
$8.10 per month$0.27 per day
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning saves $0.90 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Nemotron 3.5 Lightning with