How much does gpt-oss-20b cost per million tokens?

gpt-oss-20b costs $0.018 per million input tokens and $0.09 per million output tokens at list price, and $0.0090 per million cached input tokens.

What is the context window of gpt-oss-20b?

gpt-oss-20b accepts up to 131,072 tokens of context and returns up to 32,768 output tokens.

How much do 1,000 chat messages cost with gpt-oss-20b?

About $0.06, assuming 1,000 input + 500 output tokens per message.

Is there a cheaper alternative to gpt-oss-20b?

In the same price range, Mistral Mistral Nemo ($0.019 / $0.03), inclusionAI Ling 3.0 Flash VL ($0.021 / $0.062), inclusionAI Ling 3.0 Flash ($0.021 / $0.063) cost less per token. Quality differs: test on your own prompts.

Where can I buy OpenAI API credits for less?

Discount credit books resell OpenRouter usage below face value within their depth, OpenRouter adds a 5.5% card fee, and OpenAI sells its own credits at face value. The live table on this page ranks them for $100 of usage.

OpenAI · live price

gpt-oss-20b API pricing

gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for...

Small and cheap (under $1 per 1M)Tool callingReasoning

Input: $0.018; per 1M tokens
Output: $0.09; per 1M tokens
Cached input: $0.0090; per 1M tokens
Context: 131K; 33K max output

List price from OpenRouter, which passes OpenAI's price through without markup. Refreshed hourly. Released August 5, 2025. Model id openai/gpt-oss-20b.

What gpt-oss-20b costs in practice

At list price, before any batch or caching discount.

1,000 chat messages

$0.06

1,000 input + 500 output tokens each

1,000 RAG questions

$0.19

8,000 input + 500 output tokens each

100 coding-agent steps

$0.07

30,000 input + 2,000 output tokens each, no caching

gpt-oss-20b price history

No price change since we started tracking on 2026-10-01. We record prices daily; changes will show here.

gpt-oss-20b price by host

11 hosts serve this model. Prices are the same or higher than list; the cheapest are first.

Darkbloom$0.018 in · $0.09 out · 131K ctx · 99.8% uptime 24h
AkashML$0.02 in · $0.1 out · 131K ctx · 99.5% uptime 24h
CoreWeave$0.03 in · $0.13 out · 131K ctx · 100.0% uptime 24h
DekaLLM$0.029 in · $0.14 out · 131K ctx · 99.1% uptime 24h
DeepInfra$0.03 in · $0.14 out · 131K ctx · 100.0% uptime 24h
Parasail$0.03 in · $0.15 out · 131K ctx · 99.9% uptime 24h
Novita$0.04 in · $0.15 out · 131K ctx · 98.4% uptime 24h
SiliconFlow$0.04 in · $0.18 out · 131K ctx · 92.7% uptime 24h
Amazon Bedrock$0.07 in · $0.15 out · 131K ctx · 100.0% uptime 24h
Google$0.07 in · $0.25 out · 131K ctx · 98.2% uptime 24h
Groq$0.075 in · $0.3 out · 131K ctx · 95.9% uptime 24h

Where to buy OpenAI credits for less

gpt-oss-20b costs the same per token everywhere it's sold through OpenRouter. What changes is the price of the credits. Live quotes for $100 of usage:

#	Where you buy	You payYou pay for $100.00 of usage	vs list price	Price source
1	OrbioCardCheapest right now Credits from a discount book, plus a 5% platform fee and card processing, both included in the quote.	$85.10 incl. $2.60 card processing	-14.9%	live quote
2	smaaartCard Credits from a discount book, plus a 5% platform fee on face value. Card processing and taxes shown at checkout.	$95.00 + card processing and tax at checkout (not in this number)	-5.0%	live quote
3	Direct from the labCard Prepaid credits at face value (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google…). Taxes may apply.	$100.00 no top-up fee	list price	face value
4	OpenRouterCrypto 5% on crypto purchases. No markup on model prices.	$105.00 fees included	+5.0%	published fee
5	OpenRouterCard 5.5% on card purchases, $0.80 minimum. No markup on model prices.	$105.50 fees included	+5.5%	published fee

Disclosure: this site is run by the team behind smaaart, one of the options compared. Tables are ranked by price only, from live quotes and published fees, including when smaaart isn't first. How we compare

gpt-oss-20b cost calculator

Enter your monthly tokens to price your own usage.

Model$0.018 in / $0.09 out per 1M tokens · list price, liveInput tokens / month (millions)Output tokens / month (millions)

Usage at list price$1.80/ month(quotes below are for $5.00: purchases run from $5.00 to $10,000.00)

Cheaper alternatives to gpt-oss-20b

Other labs' models in the same price range or the one below, cheaper per token.

Model	Input / 1M	Output / 1M	Blended 3:1	Context
Mistral: Mistral Nemo	$0.019	$0.03	$0.022	131K
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash VL	$0.021	$0.062	$0.031	262K
inclusionAI: Ling 3.0 Flash	$0.021	$0.063	$0.032	262K

Other OpenAI models

Model	Input / 1M	Output / 1M	Blended 3:1	Context
gpt-oss-120b	$0.037	$0.17	$0.07	131K
GPT-5 Nano	$0.05	$0.4	$0.137	400K
GPT-5 Mini	$0.25	$2	$0.688	400K
GPT-5	$1.25	$10	$3.44	400K
o3 Pro	$20	$80	$35	200K
GPT-5 Pro	$15	$120	$41.25	400K

All OpenAI API prices