As of August 21, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 99% cheaper per million tokens than o1-preview. Grok-3 Mini is $0.30 / $0.50 per million input/output tokens versus o1-preview at $15.00 / $60.00. Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Sources: xAI API pricing (https://docs.x.ai/docs/models); OpenAI API pricing (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing)
Grok-3 Mini
xAI
Input
$0.30
Output
$0.50
o1-preview
OpenAI
Input
$15.00
Output
$60.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
Grok-3 Minio1-previewVerdict
Grok-3 Mini offers both lower pricing and stronger benchmark performance across the board, making it the clear value leader in this comparison.
As of August 21, 2026, Grok-3 Mini is 99% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens ($0.80 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). o1-preview costs $15.00 / $60.00 per million tokens ($75.00 blended). Sources: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
Grok-3 Mini xAI API pricing is $0.30 input and $0.50 output per million tokens via xAI. o1-preview OpenAI API pricing is $15.00 input and $60.00 output per million tokens via OpenAI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
o1-preview has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 41.3%. Grok-3 Mini does not have that eval on this page yet.
Grok-3 Mini supports a 128K token context window, while o1-preview supports 128K tokens. Both models have the same context window size. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Grok-3 Mini leads on 4 of 6 shared benchmarks versus o1-preview's 2 wins. Check the comparison table for GPQA Diamond, SWE-bench, MMLU, HLE, and the other evals we track. Token price and benchmark score together are the usual LLM comparison, not either number alone.
Both Grok-3 Mini and o1-preview are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Grok-3 Mini has better economics on the blended 1M-in + 1M-out scale. For maximum capability, weight the benchmark table for your domain. Many production stacks route cheap models for drafts and a frontier model for the hard turn, which is usually cheaper than sending everything to the expensive API.
Yes. Call Grok-3 Mini through xAI and o1-preview through OpenAI with separate API keys, or through a gateway that already wraps both. Keep prompts in tokens, not characters, when you estimate the invoice. AnotherWrapper templates can swap providers without rewriting auth and billing.
List rates are the latest published xAI API pricing and OpenAI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://docs.x.ai/docs/models and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing. Prompt caching, batch APIs, and committed-use discounts can change the invoice. Benchmark scores are from official publications and independent evals, updated as new numbers land.
Grok-3 Mini supports up to 8K output tokens per request, while o1-preview supports up to 33K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
Grok-3 Mini runs at approximately 100 tokens/second while o1-preview runs at 66 tokens/second. Grok-3 Mini is faster in raw throughput. Throughput (tokens per second) and time-to-first-token are why two models with the same per-million-token price can still feel different in chat and agents.
Use the model pickers at the top of this LLM comparison. Search any model in the index and the URL updates. Open Grok-3 Mini or o1-preview from the sidebar for the single-model API pricing page, or go back to the LLM pricing table to sort by cheapest blended cost.
This comparison covers API pricing, context window, throughput, and benchmark scores. Grok-3 Mini costs $0.30/M input and $0.50/M output. o1-preview costs $15.00/M input and $60.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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