O3 API Pricing
O3 costs $2.00 per 1M input tokens and $8.00 per 1M output tokens on OpenAI's API. Cached input is billed at $0.5 per 1M tokens. Prices are provider list prices in USD, refreshed as sources update; see the O3 model profile for capability scores.
Price List
| Rate | Price (USD) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $2.00 | per 1M tokens |
| Output | $8.00 | per 1M tokens |
| Cached input (read) | $0.5 | per 1M tokens |
| Blended input + output | $10.00 | 1M in + 1M out at list price |
| Context window | 200K tokens |
What a Workload Costs
Computed straight from the list prices above — token counts are illustrative workload sizes, not measurements of O3.
| Workload | Cost | Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Short chat turn | $0.00600 | 1K in / 500 out |
| Summarize a long document | $0.216 | 100K in / 2K out |
| Agentic coding session | $1.80 | 500K in / 100K out |
| 1M input + 1M output tokens | $10.00 | 1M in / 1M out |
Effective Cost
In AI IQ's scoring, O3's list price is adjusted by a token-usage multiplier of 1.052 (measured from real benchmark runs), giving an effective cost of $10.52 per 1M input + output tokens. That places it #84 of 117 models on the effective-cost ranking (lower is cheaper). Some models spend far more tokens than others on the same task, so effective cost compares what a unit of work really costs. Method details are on the methodology page; see all models on the cost charts and the falling cost of intelligence over time.
Cheaper Alternatives at Similar Capability
Models with a lower effective cost that score within a few IQ points of O3 (IQ 101), or better.
| Model | Provider | IQ | Effective Cost / 1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| gpt-5.6-luna | OpenAI | 129 | $9.29 |
| gemini-3.1-pro | 127 | $9.47 | |
| Muse Spark 1.2 | Meta | 122 | $4.19 |
| grok-4.5 | xAI | 122 | $9.47 |
| GLM-5.3-Flash | Z.ai | 121 | $4.99 |
| glm-5.2 | Z.ai | 120 | $7.28 |