NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs rekaai Reka Flash 3
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
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning accepts longer prompts: 262K vs 66K tokens.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning output costs $0.12 per 1M via Darkbloom, against the list price of $0.20.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is the newer model (released 2026-08-11).
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Reka Flash 3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | NVIDIA | rekaai |
| Released | 2026-08-11 | 2025-03-12 |
| Input / 1M | $0.07 | $0.10 |
| Output / 1M | $0.20 | $0.20 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.04 | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.103 | $0.125 |
| Context | 262K | 66K |
| Max output | 236K | 59K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 4 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.12 | $0.20 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
$7.20 per month$0.24 per day
Reka Flash 3
$9.00 per month$0.30 per day
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning saves $1.80 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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