Laguna S 2.1, the Poolside model in numbers

Laguna S 2.1 at a glance

Poolside released Laguna S 2.1 on July 21, 2026. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. Its weights are published: you can download it and run it on your own servers, or use one of the 8 API providers that list it on models.dev. That makes it 3 months old as of October 22, 2026.

We file it under open-weight models (68 models in this category on the site).

What do independent benchmarks say?

As of October 22, 2026, Epoch AI publishes no score for Laguna S 2.1 on our basket's benchmarks. To place it, rely on its specifications and price, then test it on your own cases.

How much does Laguna S 2.1 cost?

Laguna S 2.1 costs $0.09 per million input tokens and $0.18 per million output tokens (median of 8 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.002; a thousand of those tasks, $2.16.

That is 5.6 times cheaper than the median output price of open-weight models ($1).

Tokens read back from cache cost $0 per million, which helps an agent that keeps resending the same context.

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

What it can do

Its context window reaches 1,048,576 tokens, roughly 1,573 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough to load a whole book or a mid-sized codebase. A single answer can run to 32,768 tokens.

It accepts as input: text.

It can call tools (functions, APIs), which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

The weights are published on Hugging Face (poolside/Laguna-S-2.1): 117.6 billion parameters, openmdw-1.1 license and 397,257 downloads over the last 30 days. See also our list of open-source models.

Who is it for?

Given its category, Laguna S 2.1 is mainly aimed at projects where you want control over your data or hosting, or want to adapt the model to your field.

Its very large context window makes it worth considering for analysing large sets of documents in a single request.

Its very low cost (under half a cent for our sample task) means it can be called thousands of times a day.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Alternatives

In the same category, the models closest to Laguna S 2.1 are:

• Ling 3.0 Flash VL (inclusionAI (Ant Group), $0.18 per million output tokens)
• Ling 3.0 Flash (inclusionAI (Ant Group), $0.18 per million output tokens)
• Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B (NVIDIA, $0.20 per million output tokens)
• Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B (NVIDIA, $0.20 per million output tokens)