TL;DR — Gemini 3 Flash is exactly half GPT-4o-mini on both sides ($0.075/$0.30 vs $0.15/$0.60). Every number below is from our weekly-verified pricing tracker (verified 2026-08-26).
Pricing side by side (per 1M tokens, USD)
| Model | Provider | Input | Output | |-------|----------|-------|--------| | GPT-4o-mini | OpenAI | $0.15 | $0.6 | | Gemini 3 Flash | Google | $0.075 | $0.3 |
Verified 2026-08-26 against official rate cards — the tracker keeps the change log.
What a real month costs
At a standard workload of 10M input + 2M output tokens/month:
- GPT-4o-mini: $2.70
- Gemini 3 Flash: $1.35
On this mix, Gemini 3 Flash is the cheaper column (2.0× gap). Your ratio will differ — run your own mix through the LLM cost calculator.
Choose GPT-4o-mini if
OpenAI-side consistency and ecosystem: mini is the most battle-tested budget model in production stacks, and at these absolute prices the 2× rarely decides budgets alone.
Choose Gemini 3 Flash if
pure floor pricing: half of already-cheap is still half — at high volume (billions of tokens), Flash's edge is real money.
Routing decision card
- At low volume the 2× gap is noise; at 1B+ tokens/month it's a line item — volume decides how much this pair matters
- Both are fungible for most bulk tasks: route by availability/latency and treat price as the tiebreak
- The pair to actually test: each vs DeepSeek V4 Flash, which splits their pricing
- The router answer: most teams shouldn't hard-pick one — ClawRouters routes each request to whichever side fits it, so the comparison becomes a per-call decision instead of a bet.
Per-model detail: GPT-4o-mini deep dive
Part of the LLM model comparison index. Prices move fast in 2026 — the tracker logs every change with dates.