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Bielik for Business: Data, Cost and Quality Test
Short answer
Bielik makes sense for a company that wants to keep processing in its own environment, has many similar cases and a person responsible for data and updates. The v3.0 versions are licensed under Apache 2.0, but the terms of use forbid processing personal data, so plan the first trial on documents without such data.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- model on your server or in the cloud in the EU
- quoted after the review
- same work in application with EU cloud model
- from €3,000
- task, data and equipment analysis
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Bielik in a company: statistics 2026
34,540
cases a month is the point from which a GEX45 server with upkeep costs less than the API, for a case of 3,000 + 1,000 tokens. Scenario at October 2026 prices.
32
According to the SpeakLeash model card (2025), Bielik-11B-v3.0-Instruct was trained on texts in 32 European languages with an emphasis on Polish and released under the Apache 2.0 licence.
Source: SpeakLeash, Bielik-11B-v3.0-Instruct model card (2025) ↗
1.1
According to the Bielik 3.0 terms of use, version 1.1 of 31 July 2025, the model and the services may not be used to process any personal data.
146
According to Bartanowicz and Jassem (LREC 2026), in a RAG system on technical documentation assessed on 146 reference questions, Bielik-11B-v2.3-Instruct consistently outperformed PLLuM-12B-nc-chat.
83%
According to Smits and Walkowiak (EACL 2026), in RAG on Polish Wikipedia assessed on 1,000 PolQA questions, PLLuM-12B matched the quality of 70B models while using 83% less energy.
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
What Bielik covers today
Bielik is a family of Polish language models developed by the SpeakLeash Foundation and ACK Cyfronet AGH. The official cards describe the variants Bielik 1.5B v3.0 Instruct, Bielik 4.5B v3.0 Instruct, Bielik 11B v3.0 Instruct and Bielik Minitron 7B v3.0 Instruct. According to its card, the 11B version was trained on texts in 32 European languages with an emphasis on Polish, on more than 20 million instructions.
A model for chat and following instructions is one element. The company still needs an application, knowledge sources, permissions and a review procedure, because downloading the files does not finish the project.
Licence and terms of use
Apache 2.0 allows you to use, modify and deploy the model commercially under the terms of that licence. The Bielik 3.0 terms of use, version 1.1 of 31 July 2025, describe downloading the model to your own infrastructure and list forbidden uses, including processing any personal data. The model's licence also does not cover the company's documents, the data for fine-tuning or the server.
Where to start a trial
Document classification
assignment to a category and missing fields
the result is easy to measure by the number of corrections
Answers from a knowledge base
procedures and products with the source and date
a message when there is no basis
Draft replies
a draft message for approval
a fixed type of question
Prepare 50 to 100 cases from one process, with no personal data. For each, write down the expected result, the allowed sources and the cases where the system should ask a person. Run the same set on Bielik and on one model through an API, and compare accuracy, faithfulness to the source, behaviour when data are missing and the number of corrections an employee makes.
A quality test before you buy
- Accuracy and completeness of the answer
- Faithfulness to the source and the date of the document
- Behaviour when data are missing
- The number of corrections made by an employee
- Response time with several users at once
You compare the result with the same set on an API model. If Bielik does worse on the cases the team considers important, a cheaper server will not make up for the corrections. If the result is similar, the requirement on where processing happens decides, together with the count below. Research comparing Bielik and PLLuM is covered in the article PLLuM or Bielik.
The cost of the whole solution
- Hetzner GEX45 GPU server, 24 GB
- €214 a month
- Upkeep 8 h × €34.90
- €279
- One case on the API, 3,000 + 1,000 tokens on Claude Sonnet 5.5
- $0.016 (€0.01428)
Break-even
(€214 + €279) ÷ €0.01428 = about 34,540 cases a month
Scenario. Bielik 11B in 16 bits is about 22 GB of weights alone, so a 24 GB card leaves little room for context; in the trial we check a quantised version or a larger server. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Price of the GEX45 server with 24 GB of GPU memory from Hetzner's page on 22 October 2026, without the one-off €209 fee. The API at Anthropic's rates, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
Below the threshold the API is cheaper, and above it your own server starts to pay back, provided the trial result is good enough. At Syntalith an app on a private model costs from €3,000 net. We run the rollout as part of private LLMs, and hardware and the GDPR are covered in the article on deploying a Polish model. In the free analysis we choose the process for the trial.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: Bielik in a process
We run the same count for your process in the free analysis.
€4,188
a month for the work on 600 questions
EU cloud version payback: 0.8 mo.
Our assumptions are 12 minutes to find an answer in the documentation, and checking in 15% of the old time. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 6,000 + 500 tokens per answer in the EU cloud version, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026. We count the payback for an app with a model in the EU cloud (from €3,000 net). We price the model on your server after a call, and the cost of people's work stays the same.
See the full calculation →
