NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Upstage Solar Mini 4
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
- Solar Mini 4 is 1.2× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Solar Mini 4 accepts longer prompts: 524K vs 262K tokens.
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning output costs $0.12 per 1M via Darkbloom, against the list price of $0.20.
- Solar Mini 4 is the newer model (released 2026-09-23).
| Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Solar Mini 4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | NVIDIA | Upstage |
| Released | 2026-08-11 | 2026-09-23 |
| Input / 1M | $0.07 | $0.05 |
| Output / 1M | $0.20 | $0.20 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.04 | $0.0050 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.103 | $0.088 |
| Context | 262K | 524K |
| Max output | 236K | 131K |
| Accepts | text | text |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 4 | 2 |
| 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
Solar Mini 4
$6.00 per month$0.20 per day
Solar Mini 4 saves $1.20 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