As of August 20, 2026, Sakana Namazu is 56% cheaper per million tokens than GPT-5.1 Instant. GPT-5.1 Instant is $1.25 / $10.00 per million input/output tokens versus Sakana Namazu at $0.95 / $4.00. Sources: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://sakana.ai
Sources: OpenAI API pricing (https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing); Sakana AI pricing (https://sakana.ai)
GPT-5.1 Instant
OpenAI
Input
$1.25
Output
$10.00
Sakana Namazu
Sakana AI
Input
$0.95
Output
$4.00
Token pricing, specs, and benchmarks side by side
GPT-5.1 InstantSakana NamazuVerdict
Both models are closely matched on benchmarks. Sakana Namazu has the pricing advantage, making it the better value unless GPT-5.1 Instant's specific capabilities are critical to your workflow.
As of August 20, 2026, Sakana Namazu is 56% cheaper on blended LLM API pricing. Sakana Namazu costs $0.95 per million input tokens and $4.00 per million output tokens ($4.95 blended 1M-in + 1M-out). GPT-5.1 Instant costs $1.25 / $10.00 per million tokens ($11.25 blended). Sources: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://sakana.ai. The cheapest LLM for your app still depends on how many output tokens you generate.
GPT-5.1 Instant OpenAI API pricing is $1.25 input and $10.00 output per million tokens via OpenAI. Sakana Namazu Sakana AI API pricing is $0.95 input and $4.00 output per million tokens via Sakana AI. Use those four numbers, not ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro subscription prices, when you are comparing APIs.
GPT-5.1 Instant has a published SWE-bench Verified score of 76.3%. Sakana Namazu does not have that eval on this page yet.
GPT-5.1 Instant supports a 400K token context window, while Sakana Namazu supports 256K tokens. GPT-5.1 Instant offers a larger context window. Filling a larger window bills more input tokens, so the cheaper-per-million model can still cost more on long documents.
Shared benchmark scores for GPT-5.1 Instant and Sakana Namazu are still limited. Check the comparison table for the evals each model has published. 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 GPT-5.1 Instant and Sakana Namazu are production API models. For cost-sensitive production traffic, Sakana Namazu 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 GPT-5.1 Instant through OpenAI and Sakana Namazu through Sakana AI 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 Sakana AI API pricing, quoted per million tokens. Official rate sheets: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing and https://sakana.ai. 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.
GPT-5.1 Instant supports up to 128K output tokens per request, while Sakana Namazu supports up to 256K output tokens. Output tokens are usually the expensive half of API pricing, so a higher max output cap is a capability, not a discount.
GPT-5.1 Instant has a measured throughput of approximately 100 tokens/second. Throughput data for Sakana Namazu is not yet available. 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 GPT-5.1 Instant or Sakana Namazu 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. GPT-5.1 Instant costs $1.25/M input and $10.00/M output. Sakana Namazu costs $0.95/M input and $4.00/M output.
Rank both on the LLM leaderboard, SWE-bench, and Humanity's Last Exam.
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