The closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is Ministral 3 14B 2512 — comparable intelligence (16.0 vs 16.0); for a cheaper option, Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) runs Free/M vs $0.130/M; for more speed, gpt-oss-120b (free) hits 554 t/s; and the best open-weight substitute is MiniMax M3.
Ministral 3 14B 2512 is the closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct, with an Intelligence Index of 16.0 (Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct scores 16.0) at $0.200 per million input tokens.
Yes — Nemotron 3 Ultra (free) costs Free per million input tokens versus $0.130 for Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
MiniMax M3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 54.7 on intelligence.