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GPT vs Claude vs Gemini -- API Pricing Compared
Published May 3, 2026
GPT vs Claude vs Gemini — API Pricing Compared
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 Largely superseded by GPT-4o for most tasks at lower cost.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.