Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 is the pick when you need to fit long inputs in one request, Moondream: Moondream 3.1 when cost matters at scale.
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
AionLabs: Aion 3.5
Moondream: Moondream 3.1
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$345
$72.50
Moondream: Moondream 3.1 saves $273
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$420
$61.00
Moondream: Moondream 3.1 saves $359
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$432
Doesn't fit context
—
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$276
$39.00
Moondream: Moondream 3.1 saves $237
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$156
Doesn't fit context
—
Capabilities side by side
Capability
AionLabs: Aion 3.5
Moondream: Moondream 3.1
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
—
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
—
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
—
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
—
—
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
—
—
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
—
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
—
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
AionLabs: Aion 3.5: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-24.
Moondream: Moondream 3.1: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-10-16.
Which should you choose?
Choose AionLabs: Aion 3.5 if…
you need to fit long inputs in one request — 262K tokens is roughly 393 pages, against 48
you need tool / function calling — to call your APIs and run agent loops; Moondream: Moondream 3.1 does not advertise it
you need structured output (JSON schema) — to return JSON that validates against your schema; Moondream: Moondream 3.1 does not advertise it
you generate long outputs in one go — up to 33K tokens (about 24,600 words) per response
Choose Moondream: Moondream 3.1 if…
cost matters at scale — it is 77% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($72.50 vs $345 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need image input — to read screenshots, charts and scanned pages; AionLabs: Aion 3.5 does not advertise it
Frequently asked questions
Is AionLabs: Aion 3.5 better than Moondream: Moondream 3.1?
Neither wins outright: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 is the pick when you need to fit long inputs in one request, Moondream: Moondream 3.1 when cost matters at scale. In short: AionLabs: Aion 3.5 when you need to fit long inputs in one request, you need tool / function calling, you need structured output (JSON schema), you generate long outputs in one go; Moondream: Moondream 3.1 when cost matters at scale, you need image input.
Which is cheaper, AionLabs: Aion 3.5 or Moondream: Moondream 3.1?
Moondream: Moondream 3.1 is cheaper: $0.85 vs $3.75 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 77% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $72.50 against $345.
How much do AionLabs: Aion 3.5 and Moondream: Moondream 3.1 cost per million tokens?
AionLabs: Aion 3.5 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $6.00 per 1M output tokens; Moondream: Moondream 3.1 costs $0.30 input and $2.50 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, AionLabs: Aion 3.5 or Moondream: Moondream 3.1?
AionLabs: Aion 3.5: 262K tokens, about 393 pages, against 32K (about 48 pages) for Moondream: Moondream 3.1.
Do AionLabs: Aion 3.5 and Moondream: Moondream 3.1 support function calling and JSON output?
Aion 3.5 is a multi-model roleplaying and storytelling system from AionLabs, built on the GLM family of models. It uses a collaborative generation process in which multiple specialized models each...
Moondream 3.1 is a vision-language model from Moondream, the successor to Moondream 3 Preview, with 9B total parameters and 2B active (mixture-of-experts). It handles visual question answering, captioning, OCR, and...