The closest alternative to Qwen2.5 VL 72B Instruct is Qwen3.7 Flash — comparable intelligence (— vs —); for a cheaper option, GPT-5.6 Luna runs $0.100/M vs $0.800/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Qwen3.7 Flash is the closest alternative to Qwen2.5 VL 72B Instruct, with an Intelligence Index of — (Qwen2.5 VL 72B Instruct scores —) at $0.030 per million input tokens.
Yes — GPT-5.6 Luna costs $0.100 per million input tokens versus $0.800 for Qwen2.5 VL 72B Instruct, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen2.5 VL 72B Instruct — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.