GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct
by OpenAI · openai/gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct · #216 cheapest of 325 paid models
Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:35 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
This model is a variant of GPT-3.5 Turbo tuned for instructional prompts and omitting chat-related optimizations. Training data: up to Sep 2021.
Compare vs:Claude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 4.6Claude Haiku 4.5Gemini 3.6 Flash
Pricing
Input
$1.50
per 1M tokens
Output
$2.00
per 1M tokens
Blended (3:1)
$1.63
3 input : 1 output
Cache read
—
per 1M cached tokens
Cache write
—
per 1M tokens
Cache & batch economics
Effective prices for GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct (no cache-read rate published — hits billed as normal input).
| Cache hit rate | Effective blended $/1M | Example request* | vs no cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $1.63 | $0.155 | — |
| 50% | $1.63 | $0.155 | −0% |
| 90% | $1.63 | $0.155 | −0% |
*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates for this provider’s batch API. Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.
What a request costs
| Workload | Input tokens | Output tokens | Cost / request | Cost / 1K requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short chat message | 500 | 300 | $0.00135 | $1.35 |
| Document summary | 8,000 | 1,000 | $0.014 | $14.00 |
| Codebase question (RAG) | 30,000 | 2,000 | $0.049 | $49.00 |
| Long-context analysis | 150,000 | 5,000 | $0.235 | $235.00 |
Specs
Context window
4K
tokens
Max output
4K
tokens
Input modalities
text
Tokenizer
GPT