gpt-oss-20b API Pricing
OpenAI · context window 131K · prices updated 2026-09-15
Where gpt-oss-20b sits on price
At $0.13 per million output tokens, gpt-oss-20b is a budget tier model — 16.0× cheaper than the median output price of $2.08, which puts it in the cheapest 10% of everything we track. It is the cheapest of the 92 OpenAI models we track. Output costs 4.3× input, the usual spread — trim both, starting with the answer length.
What real workloads cost on gpt-oss-20b
These three workloads are the ones teams actually run on a budget-priced model — a $0.13/1M model is not bought for the same job as one ten times the price.
| Workload | Per request | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill. | $0 | $87.60 |
| Small app — 1K requests/day (500 in / 150 out) The baseline most side projects actually run at. | $0 | $1.03 |
| Document pipeline — 10K docs/day (3K in / 500 out) Batch-friendly: no user waiting, so a ~50% batch discount usually applies. | $0.0002 | $46.50 |
Model your exact traffic in the API cost calculator — it preloads gpt-oss-20b with caching and batch options.
gpt-oss-20b price history
gpt-oss-20b's price has not moved since we began tracking it on Aug 2, 2026 — 44 days of stability in a market where 78 of the 334 models we track have repriced over the same period, including 9 of OpenAI's own 92 models.
Change-points from our daily price snapshots (tracking since Aug 2, 2026; intraday moves between snapshots are not captured).
gpt-oss-20b vs Qwen3.7 Flash
The closest-priced alternative from another vendor is Qwen3.7 Flash (Alibaba (Qwen)) — priced within a rounding error on output, with identical input pricing. 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 Qwen3.7 Flash pricing →Cheaper alternatives
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Frequently asked questions
› How much does the gpt-oss-20b API cost?
gpt-oss-20b costs $0.03 per million input tokens and $0.13 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.03 per million (0% cheaper). That works out to roughly 7,692,308 output tokens per dollar.
› What does the high-volume classification workload cost on gpt-oss-20b?
High-volume classification — 200K requests/day (400 in / 20 out) costs about $0 per request and $87.60 per month on gpt-oss-20b. Short output, huge volume: the input price dominates the bill.
› What does it cost to fill gpt-oss-20b's 131K context window?
Sending 131K of input in a single request costs $0.0039 at $0.03 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-oss-20b worth the price?
gpt-oss-20b is in the cheapest end of the market — cheaper than 98% of the models we track. At this price the question is not cost but capability: it is a good fit for classification, extraction, routing and bulk summarisation, and a poor fit for multi-step reasoning where a wrong answer costs more than the tokens saved.