How much does an image / vision app cost on GPT-5.5?
Running an app that sends one image per request (screenshots, receipts, photos) for analysis on GPT-5.5 costs about $725/month for 300 users × 5 messages/day: that's $2.42 per user and $16.10 per 1,000 requests.
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Assumptions
- 300 users × 5 messages/day (45,000 per month)
- System prompt 400 tokens, user input 100, output 300 tokens, 1 image (~1100 tokens)
- Prompt cache hit rate 50%
- GPT-5.5 list price: $5/1M input, $30/1M output, $0.5/1M cached input; context window 1,050,000 tokens
How GPT-5.5 compares for an image / vision app
12 of 12 other popular models are cheaper for this workload. Cheapest isn't always best: check the quality index, and consider routing easy requests to a cheap model and only hard ones to a frontier model.
| Model | Quality | Monthly | Per user |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 Nano | 13 | $8.60 | $0.029 |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite | 10.4 | $11.64 | $0.039 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | 43.4 | $13.37 | $0.045 |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 9.3 | $21.07 | $0.070 |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 40.9 | $101 | $0.34 |
| GPT-5.4 Mini | 24.1 | $109 | $0.36 |
| Grok 4.3 | 24.9 | $114 | $0.38 |
| Grok 4.7 | 46.4 | $212 | $0.70 |
| Gemini 4 Argon | 52.6 | $246 | $0.82 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | 51.8 | $266 | $0.89 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | 56 | $266 | $0.89 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | 57.6 | $533 | $1.78 |
| GPT-5.5 | 38.4 | $725 | $2.42 |
More GPT-5.5 cost guides
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Prices: OpenRouter list prices (USD per 1M tokens), updated 2026-10-15. Estimates only; a month is 30 days. See how the math works.