GPT-4.1
BalancedLast verified: June 2026· OpenAI GPT-4.1 pricing
Large-context model (up to ~1M tokens). Confirm current pricing and availability with OpenAI.
- Input / 1M
- $2.00
- Output / 1M
- $8.00
- Context
- 1M tokens
- Provider
- OpenAI
Pricing verified June 2026. Prices change frequently. Always confirm against the provider’s official pricing page before relying on these figures for budgeting. Official pricing →
When to choose GPT-4.1
The long-context option on the OpenAI stack: a 1M-token window at $2 in and $8 out, a fifth of what Fable 5 charges for a window of the same size. That combination — large window, mid-tier price — is the whole argument for it, and it pays off on routes that reason across a whole repository, a long transcript, or a document set that chunks badly. On short prompts the window is capacity you are not billed for and also not using, and a cheaper row does the same job.
GPT-4.1 sits close enough to GPT-4o on price that the two are usually decided together. That comparison is written once, on the models table, rather than argued twice from opposite sides.
What GPT-4.1 costs in practice
A 50M/10M month costs $180. The same month on Gemini 2.5 Pro, the nearest row below, is $163 — around a tenth less, which is a useful reminder that neighbouring swaps rarely move a bill. The moves that matter are vertical: GPT-4o mini does that month for about $14. Filling the 1M window costs $2 of input per request, so the window is genuinely usable rather than nominal, but a habit of pasting everything into it is a decision with a price attached.
| Scenario | Input / mo | Output / mo | Est. cost / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 2M | 0.5M | $8 |
| Growing product | 50M | 10M | $180 |
| At scale | 500M | 100M | $1,800 |
Plug in your own numbers with the cost calculator.
Where GPT-4.1 fits in a routing setup
Routing into this row is governed by prompt length rather than difficulty: work that fits inside 128K has cheaper homes, and work that does not has very few. Upward, Claude Opus 4.8 offers a window of the same size for $500 on the reference month against $180, which is the move when capability rather than capacity is the binding constraint. Downward, every honest option sheds either the window or the capability, so the discipline that pays is measuring how much of the window your prompts actually use before paying to keep it.
Cheaper alternatives to GPT-4.1
The models immediately below GPT-4.1 on blended cost, nearest first. A swap only pays if quality holds on the routes you move — see the LLM cost optimization playbook for how to prove that before you move them.
Frequently asked questions
How much does GPT-4.1 cost?
GPT-4.1 bills $2.00 per million input tokens and $8.00 per million output tokens — $3.50 per million blended at a three-to-one input:output split. A workload of 50M input and 10M output tokens per month works out at about $180. Confirm current pricing with the provider.
What is GPT-4.1's context window?
GPT-4.1 has a 1M-token context window. One request that fills the whole window costs about $2.00 at the input rate, before the reply is billed.
Where does GPT-4.1 sit on price?
At $3.50 per million blended — three input tokens for every output token — GPT-4.1 is dearer than 10 of the 19 models tracked here and cheaper than 7. Output bills at 4x the input rate, and the nearest cheaper model on this table is Gemini 2.5 Pro at $3.44 blended.
Related concepts: context window, model routing, prompt caching, evals.