Model index · Text · text generation · reasoning · OpenAI · released 2025-02-12

o3 Mini High pricing

Served by 2 providers from $1.93 to $1.93 per 1M tokens on the standard tier.

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.

OpenAI o3-mini-high is the same model as [o3-mini](/openai/o3-mini) with reasoning_effort set to high. o3-mini is a cost-efficient language model optimized for STEM reasoning tasks, particularly excelling in science, mathematics, and...

OpenAI · first published 2025-02-12 · Text model · text generation · 200k context · description as published by the source, not written by us

$1.93

Cheapest standard /1M — OpenAI

200k

Native context window

3

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.

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
OpenAI cheapest standard $1.10 $4.40 $1.93 standard third_party
OpenRouter (default route) *
resells other hosts
$1.10 $4.40 $1.93 standard provider_api
OpenRouter (default route) *
resells other hosts
$0.5500 $2.20 $0.9625 batch 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:

  • batch — submitted as a batch and collected later, typically within 24 hours — not for interactive use

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: batch at $0.9625 per 1M on OpenRouter — 50% below standard , submitted as a batch and collected later, typically within 24 hours — not for interactive use.

* 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 o3 Mini High 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 o3 Mini High QualityKindContextHosts
Claude Haiku 4.5 Anthropic $2.00
Anthropic
4% dearer 60/100 reasoning 200k 8
Grok 4.3 xAI $1.56
xAI
19% cheaper 100/100 reasoning 1M 4
Mistral Medium 3.5 Mistral $3.00
Mistral
56% dearer not measured reasoning 262k 1
Qwen3.6 Max Preview Alibaba $2.31
Alibaba
20% dearer not measured reasoning 262k 1
Kimi K2 Thinking MoonshotAI $0.8525
DeepInfra
56% cheaper not measured reasoning
open weights
262k 4
GLM 5V Turbo Z.ai $1.90
OpenRouter (default route)
1% cheaper not measured reasoning 203k 1
MiMo-V2.5-Pro Xiaomi $0.5438
Xiaomi
72% cheaper not measured reasoning
open weights
1.05M 7
Nemotron 3 Ultra NVIDIA $0.9250
DeepInfra
52% cheaper not measured reasoning
open weights
1M 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.

5 of these alternatives cost less than o3 Mini High — the cheapest being MiMo-V2.5-Pro at $0.5438 per 1M tokens blended (72% cheaper).

Cheaper is not automatically better: check the quality column, and confirm the context window and capabilities your workload depends on before switching.

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 OpenAI 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 o3 Mini High cost?

The cheapest standard-tier provider is OpenAI at $1.93 per 1M tokens blended (3:1 input:output). A batch tier is available at $0.9625, 50% less, if the work can be collected later. Prices change often; verify with the provider before budgeting.

Which provider is best for o3 Mini High?

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 o3 Mini High 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.