Particle AI Particle-1 vs Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking
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.
- Particle-1 accepts longer prompts: 1M vs 262K tokens.
- Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking's best provider was more reliable over 24 h: 100% vs 99.41%.
- Particle-1 is the newer model (released 2026-10-28).
| Particle-1 | Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Particle AI | Qwen |
| Released | 2026-10-28 | 2025-10-06 |
| Input / 1M | $0.25 | $0.29 |
| Output / 1M | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.03 | — |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.438 | $0.467 |
| Context | 1M | 262K |
| Max output | 131K | 236K |
| Accepts | text, image | text, image |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 1 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $1.00 | $1.00 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 99.41% | 100% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | Operational |
Cost calculator
Particle-1
$30.00 per month$1.00 per day
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Thinking
$32.40 per month$1.08 per day
Particle-1 saves $2.40 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
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