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GPT vs Claude vs Gemini — API Pricing Compared
Published May 3, 2026
Choosing an AI model for your application involves balancing capability, latency, and cost. This article compares the API pricing for the major providers as of mid-2026.
Pricing Overview
All prices are per million tokens (input / output). Providers charge separately for what you send and what the model generates.
| Model | Input (per 1M) | Output (per 1M) | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128K |
| GPT-4o mini | $0.15 | $0.60 | 128K |
| GPT-4 Turbo | $10.00 | $30.00 | 128K |
| Claude Opus 4 | $15.00 | $75.00 | 200K |
| Claude Sonnet 4 | $3.00 | $15.00 | 200K |
| Claude 3.5 Haiku | $0.80 | $4.00 | 200K |
| Gemini 1.5 Pro | $1.25 | $5.00 | 1M |
| Gemini 1.5 Flash | $0.075 | $0.30 | 1M |
Prices are informational and subject to change. Always verify at the provider's official pricing page.
Budget Tier: Mini / Haiku / Flash
For high-volume workloads where cost is the primary constraint:
- GPT-4o mini — The most widely used budget option. Strong general-purpose performance, especially for English tasks.
- Claude 3.5 Haiku — Fast, cost-efficient, notably good at structured output and code.
- Gemini 1.5 Flash — The cheapest input pricing of the three. Excellent for tasks that fit within a large context.
At 1,000 req/day with 1,000 input + 500 output tokens, monthly costs are roughly:
- GPT-4o mini: ~$10
- Gemini 1.5 Flash: ~$3.50
- Claude 3.5 Haiku: ~$33
Mid-Tier: GPT-4o / Sonnet / Gemini 1.5 Pro
These are the workhorse models for production applications:
- GPT-4o — Broad benchmark leader, multimodal (vision + text), strong code generation.
- Claude Sonnet 4 — Longer context (200K vs 128K), nuanced writing, strong instruction following.
- Gemini 1.5 Pro — 1 million token context window; useful for long document analysis.
GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 4 are priced similarly; Gemini 1.5 Pro is about half the cost of both.
Premium Tier: GPT-4 Turbo / Claude Opus
- GPT-4 Turbo — Legacy premium option. Largely superseded by GPT-4o for most tasks at lower cost.
- Claude Opus 4 — Anthropic's most capable model. At $15 input / $75 output, it is appropriate only for tasks where maximum quality justifies the cost.
Key Differences Beyond Price
Context window — Gemini 1.5 Pro (1M tokens) and Claude models (200K) handle much longer conversations or documents than GPT-4o (128K) without truncation.
Output length limits — Maximum output per request varies. Check provider documentation for your specific use case.
Caching — Anthropic and Google offer prompt caching discounts for repeated context. OpenAI offers automatic caching for certain prompts. For applications with a large fixed system prompt, this can halve effective input costs.
Rate limits — Free tier and early-access tier rate limits differ significantly. Factor in rate limits if building for burst traffic.
How to Choose
- Start cheap, upgrade if needed. Test GPT-4o mini or Gemini 1.5 Flash first. Only upgrade to a premium model if quality testing reveals a meaningful gap for your specific task.
- Long documents → Gemini 1.5 Pro or Claude. If you need to process books, legal contracts, or large codebases in one call, the 200K–1M context window is decisive.
- Structured output → Claude Haiku or GPT-4o mini. Both are reliable for JSON extraction, classification, and entity recognition.
- Complex reasoning → GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet 4. For math, multi-step logic, or nuanced writing, the mid-tier models are usually sufficient.