As of August 21, 2026, o3-mini and o4-mini have the same blended API cost at $5.50 per 1 million input plus 1 million output tokens. o3-mini is $1.10 / $4.40 per million tokens versus o4-mini at $1.10 / $4.40. Source: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
Source: OpenAI API pricing (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing)
o3-mini
OpenAI
Input
$1.10
Output
$4.40
o4-mini
OpenAI
Input
$1.10
Output
$4.40
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
o3-minio4-miniVerdict
o3-mini offers significantly lower pricing, while o4-mini leads on benchmark performance. Your choice depends on whether cost efficiency or raw capability matters more for your use case.
As of August 21, 2026, o3-mini is 0% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. o3-mini costs $1.10 per million input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens ($5.50 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). o4-mini costs $1.10 / $4.40 per million tokens ($5.50 blended). Sources: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
o3-mini OpenAI API pricing is $1.10 input and $4.40 output per million tokens via OpenAI. o4-mini OpenAI API pricing is $1.10 input and $4.40 output per million tokens via OpenAI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
o4-mini leads on SWE-bench Verified: o3-mini at 49.3% vs o4-mini at 68.1%. SWE-bench measures real GitHub fixes; LiveCodeBench measures contest programming.
o3-mini supports a 200K token context window, while o4-mini supports 200K 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.
o4-mini leads on 24 of 29 shared benchmarks versus o3-mini's 5 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 o3-mini and o4-mini are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, o3-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 o3-mini through OpenAI and o4-mini 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 OpenAI API pricing and OpenAI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing 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.
o3-mini supports up to 100K output tokens per request, while o4-mini supports up to 100K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
o3-mini runs at approximately 115 tokens/second while o4-mini runs at 115 tokens/second. o4-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 o3-mini or o4-mini 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. o3-mini costs $1.10/M input and $4.40/M output. o4-mini costs $1.10/M input and $4.40/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
The index
280 models across 33 providers. Search or jump to a lab — every model page stays linked here.
Next step
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