Side-by-side API pricing and tokenizer details for Llama 4 Scout (Meta) and o4-mini (OpenAI).
Side-by-side pricing
Feature
Llama 4 Scout
o4-mini
Provider
Meta
OpenAI
Input (per 1M tokens)
$0.100
$1.10
Output (per 1M tokens)
$0.300
$4.40
Context caching
No
No
Batch API discount
Not available
50% off
Context window
1M tokens
200K tokens
Tokenizer
Heuristic (~chars/4)
o200k_base (tiktoken)
ⓘ Llama 4 Scout: Meta retired the Llama API on 2026-07-06, so there is no vendor price. Figures and context window reflect OpenRouter; other hosts differ.
ⓘ o4-mini: 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).
Llama 4 Scout
$0.1100
Input: $0.0500 +Output: $0.0600
o4-mini
$1.4300
Input: $0.5500 +Output: $0.8800
Llama 4 Scout is 92% cheaper for this workload — saving $1.3200 per month at this volume.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, Llama 4 Scout is cheaper for the typical workload above. At $0.100/1M input and $0.300/1M output tokens, it costs $0.1100 versus $1.4300 for o4-mini — a 92% difference. Costs scale linearly with request volume, so larger workloads amplify this gap.
Llama 4 Scout supports a 1M token context window. o4-mini supports a 200K token context window. A larger context window lets you include more text — documents, conversation history, or code — in a single API call.
Llama 4 Scout does not support context caching. It does not offer a batch API discount. o4-mini does not support context caching. It offers a 50% Batch API discount.
No, they use different tokenizers. Llama 4 Scout uses the Heuristic (~chars/4), while o4-mini 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.
Llama 4 Scout (Meta): $0.1 input / $0.3 output per 1M tokens. o4-mini (OpenAI): $1.1 input / $4.4 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 — Llama 4 Scout costs $0.2600 per 1M total tokens and o4-mini costs $3.7400. Llama 4 Scout is 93% cheaper for this pattern. For your exact ratio, paste a real prompt into the calculator above.
Llama 4 Scout has a 1M-token context window — approximately 750K words or ~3K pages of standard text. o4-mini has a 200K-token context window — approximately 150K words or ~600 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.