GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k API Pricing
OpenAI · context window 16K · prices updated 2026-09-21
Where GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k sits on price
At $4.00 per million output tokens, GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k is a mid tier model — 2.0× the median output price of $2.00, which puts it cheaper than 36% and pricier than 64% of the models we track. It sits 32th cheapest of the 91 OpenAI models we track. Output is only 1.3× the input price, an unusually flat spread: long prompts hurt about as much as long answers, so prompt size is where the savings are.
What real workloads cost on GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a mid-priced model — a $4.00/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win. | $0.0206 | $309 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.011 | $3300 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0.0021 | $63.00 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k with caching and batch options.
GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k price history
GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 50 days of stability in a market where 79 of the 335 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 9 of OpenAI's own 91 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k vs Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Thinking
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Thinking (Alibaba (Qwen)) — priced within a rounding error on output, with $2.60 less per million input tokens. When two models land this close on price, the decision is quality on your own workload, not the price sheet: run 50 real requests through both and compare.
See Qwen3 VL 235B A22B Thinking pricing →Cheaper alternatives
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Frequently asked questions
› How much does the GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k API cost?
GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k costs $3.00 per million input tokens and $4.00 per million output tokens and no discounted cached-input tier. That works out to roughly 250,000 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the support chatbot workload cost on GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k?
Support chatbot — 500 conversations/day (5K in / 1.4K out) costs about $0.0206 per request and $309 per month on GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k. Conversation history re-sent each turn — the classic prompt-caching win.
› What does it cost to fill GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k's 16K context window?
Sending 16K of input in a single request costs $0.0492 at $3.00 per million tokens — before any output. There is no cached-input tier on this model, so every repeat of that context is billed at full price. This is why large context windows are cheap to advertise and expensive to actually use.
› Is GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k worth the price?
GPT-3.5 Turbo 16k sits in the middle of the market (32 of 91 by price within OpenAI). The honest test is a routing experiment: send the same 200 real requests to this model and to a tier below, and compare failure rate against the price gap — most teams find a majority of traffic never needed the pricier model.