Gemma 3 4B — Specifications
| Developer | |
|---|---|
| Type | LLM (multimodal) |
| Modality | Text, Image → Text |
| Parameters | 4B |
| Context window | 128K |
| Max output | — |
| License | Gemma (open) |
| Open weights | Yes |
| Released | 2025 |
| Input price | $0.05 /1M |
| Output price | $0.1 /1M |
| API providers | Google AI Studio, Ollama |
Run it locally
| VRAM (4-bit) | ~3 GB |
|---|---|
| Minimum GPU | Any 6GB+ GPU |
What is Gemma 3 4B?
Gemma 3 4B is the compact end of Google’s open Gemma 3 family: multimodal text and image
input, a 128K context, and roughly 3 GB of VRAM at 4-bit — small enough for almost any modern
GPU, and for a good deal of hardware that is not a GPU at all.
What is unusual here is the context window. A 4B model with 128K context is not the normal
trade-off; small models historically shipped with small windows, which limited them to short
prompts and made them useless for document work. Gemma 3 4B can hold a substantial document
in memory on a 6 GB card, which opens up edge and on-device use cases — local document
search, offline assistants, in-browser or in-app inference — that previously required sending
data to a server. Do not expect it to reason like a frontier model; expect it to be the
model that makes a privacy-preserving feature feasible at all. At $0.05 in / $0.10 out per
million tokens the hosted option is close to free, so self-hosting here is about data
residency and latency, not cost.
Gemma 3 4B pricing: API cost per 1M tokens
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.0500 |
|---|---|
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $0.100 |
| Output/input ratio | 2× |
| Blended (4:1 in:out) | $0.0600 per 1M tokens |
What Gemma 3 4B costs per month
Real monthly spend at a 4:1 input-to-output mix — the ratio a typical chat or RAG workload actually produces.
| Workload | Tokens / month | Cost / month |
|---|---|---|
| Side project | 1M in / 0.25M out | $0.08 |
| Small team | 20M in / 5M out | $1.50 |
| Production | 200M in / 50M out | $15 |
Run your own numbers in the AI API cost calculator.
Cheaper alternatives to Gemma 3 4B
| Model | Blended $/1M | You save |
|---|---|---|
| Mistral 7B open | $0.0220 | 63% cheaper |
| Llama 3.1 8B open | $0.0220 | 63% cheaper |
| Mistral NeMo 12B open | $0.0240 | 60% cheaper |
Self-host or pay the API?
Gemma 3 4B is open-weight, so you can run it yourself. It needs ~3 GB of VRAM at 4-bit (Any 6GB+ GPU). Self-hosting only beats the API once your volume is high enough to keep that hardware busy — the self-hosting vs API calculator works out the break-even point for your token volume.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Gemma 3 4B cost per 1M tokens?
Gemma 3 4B costs $0.0500 per 1M input tokens and $0.100 per 1M output tokens. At a typical 4:1 input-to-output mix that blends to about $0.0600 per 1M tokens.
How much does Gemma 3 4B cost per month?
A small-team workload of 20M input and 5M output tokens a month costs about $1.50 on Gemma 3 4B. A side project (1M in / 0.25M out) costs roughly $0.08.
What is a cheaper alternative to Gemma 3 4B?
Mistral 7B is the strongest cheaper option in our database at $0.0220 per 1M blended — about 63% less than Gemma 3 4B. It is also open-weight, so self-hosting is an option.
Can I run Gemma 3 4B locally?
Yes. Gemma 3 4B is open-weight and needs about ~3 GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantisation (Any 6GB+ GPU).
Why does Gemma 3 4B charge more for output than input?
Output tokens are generated one at a time and cannot be batched the way a prompt can, so they cost the provider more to serve. Gemma 3 4B charges 2× more for output, which is why prompt-heavy workloads are far cheaper to run than generation-heavy ones.
Prices are the published list rates for the model's primary API and are reviewed as providers change them. Volume, batch and cached-input discounts are not included. Compare every model side by side in the AI models database or the LLM leaderboard.
