GPT-4.1 pricing
A million-token context window at a mid-tier price, which remains the reason to reach for it over newer models when the whole codebase has to fit in one request.
List prices checked
By OpenAI · Balanced tier
Token pricing
Per million tokens, from the official price list.
| Token type | Price per 1M | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $2.00 | Everything you send, including the system prompt |
| Output | $8.00 | Everything the model generates, reasoning tokens included |
| Cached input | $0.500 | Repeated prefixes served from cache |
| Blended (3:1) | $3.50 | One number for ranking, at three input tokens per output token |
Source: OpenAI pricing (May 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.
Capabilities
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Context window | 1M tokens |
| Max output | 33K tokens |
| Inputs accepted | text, image |
| Cost to fill the context once | $2.10 |
What it costs per month
Token prices applied to three workload shapes. Input-heavy and output-heavy workloads rank models very differently.
In-app chat assistant
A support or help assistant handling a few thousand conversations a month, with short prompts and short answers.
$80/mo
- 20M input tokens$40
- 5M output tokens$40
- If fully cached$50
RAG over documents
Retrieval-augmented answering where each request stuffs several retrieved passages into the prompt, so input dominates.
$720/mo
- 300M input tokens$600
- 15M output tokens$120
- If fully cached$270
Coding agent
An agentic loop that reads files and writes patches, generating heavy output and re-sending large context on every turn.
$1,600/mo
- 400M input tokens$800
- 100M output tokens$800
- If fully cached$1,000
GPT-4.1 vs other balanced models
Same capability tier, ranked by blended token price.
| Model | Input | Output | Context | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-4o | $2.50 | $10.00 | 128K | Head to head |
| OpenAI o4-mini | $1.10 | $4.40 | 200K | Head to head |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | 200K | Head to head |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.300 | $2.50 | 1M | Head to head |
| Grok 3 mini | $0.300 | $0.500 | 131K | Head to head |
| Codestral | $0.300 | $0.900 | 262K | Head to head |
Questions about pricing
- How much does the GPT-4.1 API cost in 2026?
- $2.00 per million input tokens and $8.00 per million output tokens, from OpenAI's published pricing. The table above converts that into a monthly figure for three common workloads.
- What is the GPT-4.1 context window?
- 1M tokens, with up to 33K tokens of output per request. Filling the window costs whatever that many input tokens cost — at $2.00 per million, a single full-context request runs about $2.10.
- Does GPT-4.1 support prompt caching?
- Yes. Cached input is billed at $0.500 per million tokens, roughly 4× cheaper than uncached input. For an agent that resends the same system prompt and file context on every turn, that discount usually matters more than the headline rate does.
- Is GPT-4.1 cheaper than the alternatives?
- On a blended 3:1 input-to-output basis it works out at $3.50 per million tokens. The comparison table below ranks it against the other balanced models in the dataset, and the head-to-head pages model both against identical workloads.