How Much Does GPT-4 Cost Per Month?
At 1M tokens/day: GPT-4o costs ~$375/month. Claude Sonnet ~$540/month. Gemini Flash ~$15/month. Use the cheapest model that meets your quality bar.
Monthly Cost by Model (at 1M tokens/day)
Assuming a typical 50/50 input/output split:
| Model | Daily Cost | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o | $6.25 | ~$188 |
| GPT-4o (heavy output) | $12.50 | ~$375 |
| Claude Sonnet 4 | $9.00 | ~$270 |
| Claude Sonnet 4 (heavy output) | $18.00 | ~$540 |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash | $0.25 | ~$8 |
| Gemini 2.0 Flash (heavy output) | $0.50 | ~$15 |
| GPT-4o Mini | $0.38 | ~$11 |
"Heavy output" assumes 80% of tokens are output, which is common for generation tasks.
Cost by Usage Level
| Usage | GPT-4o/month | Gemini Flash/month |
|---|---|---|
| 100K tokens/day (light) | ~$19 | ~$0.75 |
| 500K tokens/day (medium) | ~$94 | ~$3.75 |
| 1M tokens/day (heavy) | ~$188 | ~$7.50 |
| 5M tokens/day (enterprise) | ~$938 | ~$37.50 |
| 10M tokens/day (high-volume) | ~$1,875 | ~$75 |
How to Reduce Costs
- Model routing — Use GPT-4o Mini or Gemini Flash for simple tasks, GPT-4o only for complex ones
- Prompt optimization — Shorter prompts = fewer input tokens. Remove redundant instructions.
- Caching — Cache responses for repeated queries. OpenAI and Anthropic offer prompt caching.
- Max tokens — Set
max_tokensto limit output length and prevent runaway costs - Batch API — OpenAI's Batch API offers 50% discounts for non-real-time workloads
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