Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite vs GPT-4o — Side-by-side pricing
Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google) and GPT-4o (OpenAI).
Side-by-side pricing
| Feature | Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite | GPT-4o |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | OpenAI | |
| Input (per 1M tokens) | $0.300 | $2.50 |
| Output (per 1M tokens) | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| Context caching | Yes — 90% off cached tokens | No |
| Batch API discount | 50% off | 50% off |
| Context window | 1M tokens | 128K tokens |
| Tokenizer | Gemini tokenizer | o200k_base (tiktoken) |
ⓘ GPT-4o: Deprecated by OpenAI. API access shuts down 2026-10-23; calls will error after that date. Prices are no longer listed on OpenAI's pricing page and could not be re-verified from a vendor source.
Real-world cost example
1,000 API requests per month, each with 500 input tokens and 200 output tokens (500K input + 200K output total).
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
$0.6500
Input: $0.1500 +Output: $0.5000
GPT-4o
$3.2500
Input: $1.2500 +Output: $2.0000
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is 80% cheaper for this workload — saving $2.6000 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.300/1M input and $2.50/1M output tokens, it costs $0.6500 versus $3.2500 for GPT-4o — a 80% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite supports a 1M token context window. GPT-4o supports a 128K token context window. A larger context window lets you include more text — documents, conversation history, or code — in a single API call.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite supports context caching (90% off repeated tokens). It offers a 50% Batch API discount. GPT-4o does not support context caching. It offers a 50% Batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite uses the Gemini tokenizer, while GPT-4o uses o200k_base (tiktoken). Different tokenizers split text differently, so the same prompt will produce different token counts on each model — the effective cost difference may be larger or smaller than the per-token price difference alone suggests.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite (Google): $0.3 input / $2.5 output per 1M tokens. GPT-4o (OpenAI): $2.5 input / $10 output per 1M tokens. Rates shown before caching or batch discounts.
For an 80% output / 20% input workload — typical for code generation or long-form writing — Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite costs $2.0600 per 1M total tokens and GPT-4o costs $8.5000. Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is 76% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K pages of standard text. GPT-4o has a 128K-token context window — approximately 96K words or ~384 pages. (Estimates assume ~0.75 words per token.)
Calculate costs for your actual prompt
Paste your prompt into the calculator and get exact token counts using each model's real tokenizer — all in your browser.
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