Model index · Text · text generation · reasoning · open weights · OpenAI · released 2025-08-05

gpt-oss-20b pricing

Served by 15 providers from $0.0550 to $0.1312 per 1M tokens on the standard tier — a 2.4× gap for identical weights.

A reasoning model — the headline price is not the whole bill

This model thinks before it answers, and those thinking tokens are billed at the output rate while never appearing in the response. A request can therefore cost several times what the per-1M figure suggests, and the multiplier depends on your prompts rather than on anything we can publish. Compare it against other reasoning models — the alternatives below are ordered to put those first.

gpt-oss-20b is an open-weight 21B parameter model released by OpenAI under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with 3.6B active parameters per forward pass, optimized for...

OpenAI · 21.51B parameters · apache-2.0 · first published 2025-08-05 · Text model · text generation · 131k context · description as published by the source, not written by us

Open weights: openai/gpt-oss-20b · 21.51B parameters counted from the weight files · licence apache-2.0 · 7.9M downloads in the last 30 days . Parameter count and licence come from the public weights registry, not from a seller — and the download figure exists only for models published this way, so it is not a market-wide popularity measure.

$0.0550

Cheapest standard /1M — OpenRouter (default route)

131k

Native context window

17

Providers serving it

Quality not measured yet

Quality not measured yet

We measure models on request rather than pre-scoring the whole catalog, so this one has no score yet. Absence of a score is not a low score.

At 1M requests/month (1500 in / 500 out tokens), moving from Groq to CoreWeave saves about $153/month.

Illustrative traffic shape, stated so you can check it against your own. Same weights both sides — but confirm quantisation and context below before switching.

Every provider and service tier

Standard on-demand rows first, cheapest of each group first. Tiers are not interchangeable — see the note below the table.

Provider In /1M Out /1M Blended /1M Tier Region Source
CoreWeave cheapest standard $0.0300 $0.1300 $0.0550 standard third_party
OpenRouter (default route) *
resells other hosts
$0.0300 $0.1300 $0.0550 standard provider_api
DeepInfra $0.0300 $0.1400 $0.0575 standard provider_api
DeepInfra $0.0300 $0.1400 $0.0575 standard third_party
Parasail $0.0300 $0.1500 $0.0600 standard third_party
Novita $0.0400 $0.1500 $0.0675 standard third_party
Phala $0.0400 $0.1500 $0.0675 standard third_party
Novita $0.0400 $0.1500 $0.0675 standard provider_api
SiliconFlow $0.0400 $0.1800 $0.0750 standard third_party
Together $0.0500 $0.2000 $0.0875 standard third_party
Amazon (Bedrock) $0.0700 $0.1500 $0.0900 standard eu-west-1 third_party
Amazon (Bedrock) $0.0700 $0.1500 $0.0900 standard third_party
Google $0.0700 $0.2500 $0.1150 standard us-central1 third_party
Fireworks $0.0700 $0.3000 $0.1275 standard third_party
Groq $0.0750 $0.3000 $0.1312 standard third_party
DeepInfra $0.0240 $0.1120 $0.0460 flex provider_api
DeepInfra $0.0450 $0.2100 $0.0862 priority provider_api

Not every row is the same product

This table mixes service tiers, and they are not interchangeable. Rows marked standard are ordinary on-demand requests. The others trade delivery for price:

  • flex — queued at lower priority, so latency is higher and requests can be deferred under load
  • priority — reserved capacity for tighter, more predictable latency

Every comparison elsewhere on this site uses the standard tier, so a model is never shown at a queued rate beside another model's on-demand rate.

Cheaper if your workload can wait: flex at $0.0460 per 1M on DeepInfra — 16% below standard , queued at lower priority, so latency is higher and requests can be deferred under load.

* OpenRouter chooses a host for each request, and the figure above is what its default choice costs — not a fixed rate for this model. Selecting a specific host through the same account costs whatever that host charges, which is why this row can sit above or below the hosts listed beside it. Token rates are passed through from the underlying provider with no markup, so the per-1M price above is what that host charges directly — OpenRouter's own charge sits on funding instead: 5.5% (min $0.80) by Stripe or 5% by Coinbase to buy credits, 5% of the equivalent spend if you bring your own provider key. So budget about 5% above the rate shown unless you already hold credit. Fee schedule.

Compare gpt-oss-20b with alternatives

One model per vendor, ordered by how prominent the vendor is and how many independent providers serve the model — hosts only carry what customers ask for, so that is a real demand signal. This is not traffic or popularity data, which we do not have. Every alternative below does the same job — text generation — because a price comparison between a generator and, say, an upscaler is arithmetic rather than advice. Prices on both sides are standard on-demand rates, so the comparison is like for like — a discounted batch or flex rate is never shown against another model’s standard rate.

AlternativeVendor $/1M vs gpt-oss-20b QualityKindContextHosts
DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek $0.2413
StreamLake
339% dearer 60/100 reasoning
open weights
164k 16
Kimi K2.5 MoonshotAI $0.7875
DigitalOcean
1332% dearer 75/100 reasoning
open weights
262k 14
MiniMax M2.5 Minimax $0.3900
OpenRouter (default route)
609% dearer 0/100 reasoning
open weights
205k 11
MiMo-V2.5 Xiaomi $0.1750
Xiaomi
218% dearer 100/100 reasoning
open weights
1.05M 5
Qwen3 30B A3B Alibaba $0.2150
OpenRouter (default route)
291% dearer not measured reasoning
open weights
131k 5
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B NVIDIA $0.0875
OpenRouter (default route)
59% dearer not measured reasoning 262k 8
Gemma 4 26B A4B Google $0.1375
DeepInfra
150% dearer not measured reasoning
open weights
262k 12
Grok Build 0.1 xAI $1.25
xAI
2173% dearer not measured reasoning 256k 4

Prices are the cheapest host for each model, blended at a 3:1 input:output ratio. "Quality" is our own probe suite where we have run it — see what it measures. A cheaper alternative is only a real saving if it also passes on the capability your workload needs.

Before you switch

Identical weights do not guarantee identical output. Check that the cheaper host serves the model at full precision rather than a quantised copy, that its context window matches what you need, and that its rate limits carry your peak traffic. A cheaper host that cannot take your throughput is not cheaper — it is an outage.

Move to CoreWeave without a rewrite

VernaOne fronts every provider on this page with one API, so switching host is a config change — with automatic fallback if quality or latency regresses.

Try VernaOne free →

Frequently asked

How much does gpt-oss-20b cost?

The cheapest standard-tier provider is CoreWeave at $0.0550 per 1M tokens blended (3:1 input:output). A flex tier is available at $0.0460, 16% less, if the work can be queued. The dearest is Groq at $0.1312 — a 2.4× difference for the same weights. Prices change often; verify with the provider before budgeting.

Which provider is best for gpt-oss-20b?

Cheapest is not automatically best. Compare quantisation (a lossy copy of the weights changes output), the context window each host actually serves, and rate limits. Where a provider serves less context than the model's native window we flag it in the table above.

Can I switch providers for gpt-oss-20b without changing code?

Yes, if you route through an abstraction. VernaOne exposes one API across every provider listed here, so switching host is a config change and you keep automatic fallback if the new one degrades.

← All models · Generated catalog of AI models and every provider that serves them, with normalised prices in USD per 1,000,000 tokens. Blended prices assume a 3:1 input:output ratio.