OpenAI API Pricing: Live Per-Token Rates and What They Cost on Real Work

TL;DR: OpenAI API pricing is pay-as-you-go and metered per token. As of the OpenRouter snapshot pulled July 10, 2026, rates run from $0.05 per 1M input tokens (gpt-5-nano) to $30.00 per 1M output on the GPT-5.6 flagship tier. There is no flat fee. Picking a nano or mini model instead of a flagship cuts the same workload's bill 5x to 25x. Cheapest usable production model: gpt-5-nano.

Search "openai api pricing" and Google answers with an AI Overview stitched from vendor blogs. In the July 10, 2026 snapshot for this query, its table stops at GPT-5.5 and lists o4-mini at $0.55/$2.20; the live OpenRouter feed already carries the GPT-5.6 family that shipped July 9 and shows o4-mini at $1.10/$4.40. Static articles go stale the week a model ships. This page reads OpenRouter live pricing from a dated snapshot and adds the layer nobody publishes: what each price costs on a real workload, and where a cheaper model does the same job.

Disclosure: we have no affiliate or paid relationship with OpenAI as of publication. We pull prices from OpenRouter's public model feed; how we use that feed is documented in our OpenRouter review. Prices last verified July 10, 2026.

OpenAI API pricing right now (live table)

OpenAI API pricing is pay-as-you-go and metered per token. As of the OpenRouter snapshot of July 10, 2026, rates run from $0.05 per 1M input tokens on gpt-5-nano to $30.00 per 1M output on the GPT-5.6 flagship. Input and output are billed separately, and output usually costs 4x to 8x more than input. In full: gpt-5-nano runs $0.05 input and $0.40 output; the GPT-5.6 Sol flagship $5.00 and $30.00. Roughly 1M tokens equals 750,000 words.

Source: OpenRouter /api/v1/models snapshot, fetched July 10, 2026. Prices are per 1M tokens. OpenRouter passes first-party OpenAI list rates through at par, so these match OpenAI's own price per token; verify a specific number before you budget a large job.

OpenAI models grouped by job, with per-million-token prices.

Two catches the AI Overview misses. The GPT-5.6 family (Luna, Terra, Sol) carries canonical slugs dated 2026-07-09, and the AIO's table has not picked it up. And when a page's cost per million tokens is a screenshot from six weeks ago, it misprices your context window cost on any recent model. One note on API tiers. OpenAI's usage tiers 1 through 5 do not change the per-token price. They only raise your rate limits as your spend history grows.

GPT-5 API cost per real workload (3 scenarios)

GPT-5 API cost only means something against a workload. Here are three, each priced on the July 10, 2026 snapshot. A Hacker News thread asks how people forecast AI API costs for agent workflows. The answer this table gives: the model you pick swings the same task 5x to 25x. A token calculator that multiplies one rate hides that.

Computed from snapshot per-token rates. Batch and caching discounts below cut these further.

The chatbot shows the mini-vs-flagship gap: 50,000 conversations cost $23.25 on gpt-4o-mini or $293.75 on gpt-5.1, a 12x difference for a job most bots do fine on a mini. The agent loop breaks budgets. A single user action fans out into 3 to 30 model calls (tool use, retries, reasoning steps), so its cost is a range, not a number. At 1,000 actions per month averaging 15 calls each, that is about $270 on gpt-5.1-codex before caching. Pad the forecast for the tail, not the average.

Batch API and caching: when the discounts apply

Two discounts cut OpenAI bills, and both apply only to specific patterns. Batch API discounts take 50% off input and output. The condition: submit work asynchronously and accept results within 24 hours (OpenAI's published Batch policy). Prompt caching discounts drop repeated input tokens to roughly one-tenth of list, and the snapshot prices them per model.

Caching is visible in the table above. gpt-5.1 input drops from $1.25 to $0.13 per 1M on a cache hit, a 90% cut; gpt-4o-mini goes $0.15 to $0.075. Caching only helps when a large, stable prefix repeats across calls, which is exactly the agent-loop and long-system-prompt case. Applied to the agent loop, a 70%-cached prefix takes gpt-5.1-codex from $0.018 to about $0.0117 per call, roughly 35% off. Batch fits the document backlog: the 100,000-doc job on gpt-5-nano falls from $27.00 to $13.50. Neither discount helps a real-time chatbot, where each request is fresh and answers cannot wait 24 hours.

OpenAI API vs ChatGPT subscription: which pays off

The API has no usage caps and no flat fee. ChatGPT Plus lists at $20 per month and ChatGPT Pro at $200 (OpenAI's flat consumer plans), both rate-limited. The PAA question "Is the GPT API cheaper than ChatGPT?" has no single answer; it turns on how you use it.

$20 of API spend buys about 16M input tokens or 2M output tokens on gpt-5.1. A heavy chat user in one window blows past that. The flat plan is cheaper for them, until the caps bite. That is the friction. One widely-shared r/ClaudeAI post put it plainly: "Two compounding usage caps on the $20 plan are why OpenAI keeps my money." Subscribers hit walls mid-task with, as another refugee thread admitted, "ZERO knowledge about tokens" to plan around. The API removes the cap and the mystery: you see the meter, never get locked out, and route cheap models to cheap tasks. Spiky, automated, or product-embedded work wins on the API; all-day single-window chat wins on the subscription. For the model choices behind those routes, see best LLM for coding.

Cheaper alternatives for the same tasks

The cheapest model for production is often not an OpenAI model. Matched by task tier on the same snapshot, here is where a swap does the same job for less.

Gemini Flash pricing undercuts gpt-5-nano's output rate at the budget tier while carrying an eight-times-larger context window. A workhorse job billing $8.00 per 1M output on gpt-4.1 runs $0.87 on DeepSeek V4 Pro. That is roughly 9x cheaper, at the cost of a slower non-OpenAI ecosystem. Claude Opus pricing sits at $5.00 input and $25.00 output, below the GPT-5.6 Sol flagship on output. The catch: benchmark quality, latency, and tooling differ, so price is one axis, not the verdict. Compare the full lineup on Claude API pricing and Claude vs ChatGPT.

Match the workload to a cheaper swap, with live per-million-token rates.

FAQ

Is the OpenAI API free or paid?

Paid, with no free standing tier. You pay per token used, billed after the fact, with no flat monthly fee. New accounts sometimes get a small trial credit, and the open-weight gpt-oss models run free through OpenRouter, but the first-party OpenAI API is pay-as-you-go. Rates verified July 10, 2026.

How much is 1 million tokens on OpenAI?

It depends on the model and whether the tokens are input or output. As of July 10, 2026, gpt-5-nano costs $0.05 input and $0.40 output per 1M tokens. The GPT-5.6 Sol flagship costs $5.00 and $30.00. Roughly 1M tokens equals 750,000 words.

Is the GPT API cheaper than ChatGPT?

It depends on volume. ChatGPT Plus is a flat $20 per month with usage caps; the API has no cap but meters every token. Light, steady chat use is cheaper on the subscription. Spiky use, automation, or anything embedded in a product is usually cheaper on the API, and it never locks you out mid-task.

What is the cheapest OpenAI model for production?

gpt-5-nano, at $0.05 input and $0.40 output per 1M tokens with a 400,000-token context, is the cheapest OpenAI model usable in production (OpenRouter snapshot, July 10, 2026). For chat where quality matters more, gpt-4o-mini ($0.15/$0.60) or gpt-5-mini ($0.25/$2.00). DeepSeek and Gemini Flash undercut all three.

Prices last verified July 10, 2026, from the OpenRouter /api/v1/models snapshot (68 OpenAI models) and cross-checked against OpenAI's published pricing page. Every figure carries the snapshot date because these numbers change the week a model ships. This page refreshes on each new snapshot; how the live feed works is documented in our OpenRouter review. Community evidence: r/ClaudeAI, r/ChatGPTPro, and Hacker News threads on API cost forecasting and subscription caps.