The closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is Llama 4 Scout — comparable intelligence (10.0 vs 10.0); for a cheaper option, GPT-5.6 Luna runs $0.100/M vs $0.150/M; and the best open-weight substitute is Kimi K3.
Llama 4 Scout is the closest alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct, with an Intelligence Index of 10.0 (Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct scores 10.0) at $0.100 per million input tokens.
Yes — GPT-5.6 Luna costs $0.100 per million input tokens versus $0.150 for Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct, while staying within ~8 points of its Intelligence Index.
Kimi K3 is the strongest open-weight alternative to Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct — downloadable from Hugging Face and self-hostable, scoring 57.1 on intelligence.