COMPARISON · VERIFIED 11 JUL 2026
Which is cheapest: Claude, GPT, or Gemini?
GPT-4o mini is the cheapest of the three providers' budget models at $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens, ahead of Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.30/$2.50 and Claude Haiku 4.5 at $1.00/$5.00—though actual cost depends on your prompt size, output length, and caching strategy. For flagship models, pricing is nearly identical across providers at $3-15 per million tokens.
The honest answer is "it depends which tier you're comparing" — and most head-to-head posts pick one model from each provider without saying why that one. Here's the comparison broken out by tier, so you can compare like for like instead of a cherry-picked flagship-vs-budget matchup.
Budget tier
Cheapest way to run high volume, low-complexity tasks
At the budget tier, GPT-4o mini is the clear price leader, Gemini 2.5 Flash sits in between, and both undercut Anthropic's Haiku. If your workload is simple classification, extraction, or high-volume low-stakes generation, GPT-4o mini is the cheapest starting point, with Gemini 2.5 Flash worth a look when you need its 1M context — the quality gap on straightforward tasks is usually smaller than the price gap.
Mid tier
The default production choice for most teams
This is where most production workloads actually live, and the gap narrows. Claude Sonnet 5 stays at $2/$10 — the planned September increase to $3/$15 didn't happen, so it undercuts GPT-4o on input at the same output price. Gemini 3 Flash remains the clear value pick if your task doesn't need the extra reasoning quality Sonnet and GPT-4o are priced for.
Flagship tier
Maximum capability, priced accordingly
Gemini 3.1 Pro undercuts both Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 on paper while offering the largest context window of the three (2M tokens). Opus and GPT-5.5 sit close together on input price, with GPT-5.5 slightly more expensive on output. At this tier, the decision is rarely about the token price alone — it's about which model's reasoning style fits your specific task, since the cost difference on most real workloads is smaller than the headline per-token gap suggests.
The number that actually matters: your workload, not the rate card
A flagship model that gets a task right in one pass can be cheaper in practice than a budget model that needs three retries and a longer prompt to get there. Use the calculator with your own rough input/output split before assuming the cheapest per-token rate is the cheapest actual bill.
* Claude Sonnet 5 launched with introductory $2.00/$10.00 pricing; the planned move to $3.00/$15.00 on 1 Sep 2026 did not happen. Prices rechecked 30 September 2026 — see full methodology.