GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct API pricing
OpenRouter · chat model · 4K context · ranked #1402 of 1809 by input price
What GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct costs in practice
GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct is priced at $1.5 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens and no separately published prompt-cache rate. Against the median priced chat model ($0.5/1M in), this sits at 3.0×.
Monthly cost examples
Assuming 1,200 prompt + 400 completion tokens per request unless noted, billed 30 days a month and without cache hits.
| Workload | Cost / month | Cost / day |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 requests/day | $78 | $2.6 |
| 10,000 requests/day | $780 | $26 |
| 100,000 requests/day | $7800 | $260 |
| 1M summaries/month | $12599.87 | $420 |
Model a different profile in the cost calculator.
Capabilities
Cheaper alternatives
Ranked by blended cost (3× input + 1× output) — cheaper, but check context and capabilities before switching.
| # | Model | Provider | Input $/1M | Output $/1M | Cached $/1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gemini Exp 1114 | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 1.0M |
| 2 | Gemini Exp 1206 | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 2.1M |
| 3 | Gemma 3 27b It | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 131K |
| 4 | Gemma 4 26b A4b It | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 262K |
| 5 | Gemma 4 31b It | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 262K |
| 6 | Learnlm 1.5 Pro Experimental | Google Gemini | free | free | — | 33K |
Data provenance
This page is assembled from the sources below. Where two sources disagree, both are shown.
Only one source publishes this model; no independent cross-check available yet.
More from OpenRouter
Frequently asked
› How much does GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct cost per 1,000 tokens?
About $0.0015 for input and $0.002 for output tokens, based on the per-million rates on this page.
› Is GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct cheaper than other models?
By input price it ranks #1402 of 1809 priced chat models in this index, putting it in the more expensive half of the market.
› How often is GPT 3.5 Turbo Instruct's price checked?
The dataset was last refreshed 2026-09-13 13:40 UTC. Providers can change pricing at any time — verify with OpenRouter before committing to a budget.