OpenAI vs Replicate
Same workloads, both price lists, refreshed daily. List prices tie on nearly all 10 shared line items today, so the choice comes down to platform differences (routing, limits, tooling), summarized below.
OpenAI
The GPT and o-series API. Deepest ecosystem and tooling; pricing at the premium end but with aggressive batch and cached-input discounts.
- Frontier models
- Batch API at 50% off
- Prompt caching discounts
Replicate
Run thousands of community models (LLMs, image, audio, video) behind one API with per-second GPU billing: the fastest path from 'found a model on GitHub' to production endpoint..
- Massive community model zoo
- Per-second billing, scale to zero
- Custom models via Cog
Shared models, priced by both
List prices refreshed 2026-08-23 ยท input $/1M tokens| Model | OpenAI in/out | Replicate in/out | Cheaper input |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 Nano | $0.050 / $0.400 | $0.050 / $0.400 | tie |
| GPT-4.1 Nano | $0.100 / $0.400 | $0.100 / $0.400 | tie |
| GPT-4o-Mini | $0.150 / $0.600 | $0.150 / $0.600 | tie |
| GPT-5 Mini | $0.250 / $2.00 | $0.250 / $2.00 | tie |
| GPT-4.1 Mini | $0.400 / $1.60 | $0.400 / $1.60 | tie |
| o4 Mini | $1.10 / $4.40 | $1.00 / $4.00 | Replicate |
| GPT-5 | $1.25 / $10.00 | $1.25 / $10.00 | tie |
| GPT-4.1 | $2.00 / $8.00 | $2.00 / $8.00 | tie |
| GPT-4o | $2.50 / $10.00 | $2.50 / $10.00 | tie |
| O1 | $15.00 / $60.00 | $15.00 / $60.00 | tie |
Cheaper-on-count is a tally of listed prices, not a quality verdict: throughput, reliability and quantization differ between providers. Disclosure.