Quick Answer
Last verified:
Estimate

OpenAI Fine-tuning costs $3 to $25 per per 1M tokens as of May 2026, with 4 plans available. Pricing depends on your chosen tier, contract length, and negotiated discounts.

Use the interactive pricing calculator to estimate your exact cost based on team size and requirements.

  • Free tier: No free tier available

OpenAI Fine-tuning offers 4 pricing tiers: GPT-4o mini Fine-tuning, GPT-4o Fine-tuning, GPT-4.1-mini Fine-tuning, Reinforcement Fine-tuning (o4-mini).

Compared to other fine-tuning apis software, OpenAI Fine-tuning is positioned at the budget-friendly price point.

How much does OpenAI Fine-tuning cost?

OpenAI Fine-tuning pricing ranges from $3 to $25/per 1M tokens across 4 plans. Plans include GPT-4o mini Fine-tuning (custom pricing), GPT-4o Fine-tuning (custom pricing), GPT-4.1-mini Fine-tuning (custom pricing), Reinforcement Fine-tuning (o4-mini) (custom pricing).

OpenAI Fine-tuning Pricing Overview

OpenAI Fine-tuning has 4 pricing plans ranging from $3 to $25/per 1M tokens. The GPT-4o mini Fine-tuning plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote. The GPT-4o Fine-tuning plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote. The GPT-4.1-mini Fine-tuning plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote. The Reinforcement Fine-tuning (o4-mini) plan requires contacting sales for a custom quote.

This pricing was last verified in May 30, 2026.

Wind-down notice: OpenAI began winding down self-serve fine-tuning on 2026-05-07. New organizations cannot create training jobs, and all customers will lose access to creating new jobs by 2027-01-06. If you are evaluating this service, plan for migration before that deadline.

OpenAI Fine-tuning lets developers train custom versions of OpenAI's GPT models — including GPT-4o, GPT-4o mini, and GPT-4.1-mini — on proprietary datasets via the API. Pricing is pay-as-you-go, charged per million training tokens with no seat fees or subscriptions. GPT-4.1-mini training is approximately $0.80/1M tokens; GPT-4o training is approximately $25.00/1M tokens. A Reinforcement Fine-tuning option is available for o4-mini at $100/hour of training compute. Fine-tuned model inference is billed at a premium above base model rates.

How OpenAI Fine-tuning Pricing Compares

Compare OpenAI Fine-tuning pricing against top alternatives in Fine-tuning APIs.

All OpenAI Fine-tuning Plans & Pricing

Plan Monthly Annual Best For
View all features by plan (compare side-by-side)

GPT-4o mini Fine-tuning

  • Fine-tune GPT-4o mini on custom datasets
  • ~$3.00 per 1M training tokens (historical rate; service winding down)
  • Inference at a premium over base model rates
  • Pay-as-you-go, no seat fees

GPT-4o Fine-tuning

  • Fine-tune GPT-4o on custom datasets
  • ~$25.00 per 1M training tokens
  • ~$3.75 per 1M input tokens (inference)
  • ~$15.00 per 1M output tokens (inference)

GPT-4.1-mini Fine-tuning

  • Fine-tune GPT-4.1-mini on custom datasets
  • ~$0.80 per 1M training tokens (approximate)
  • Pay-as-you-go billing
  • Inference billed at premium over base rates

Reinforcement Fine-tuning (o4-mini)

  • Reinforcement Fine-tuning on o4-mini
  • $100 per hour of wall-clock training time (prorated to the second)
  • Suitable for reasoning and agentic tasks
  • Separate billing from supervised fine-tuning
Compare OpenAI Fine-tuning with alternativesAdjust seats, lock a tier, add up to 2 more products side-by-side. Shareable URL.

Compare OpenAI Fine-tuning vs Alternatives

Before committing to OpenAI Fine-tuning, compare pricing with these 3 alternatives in the same category.

All OpenAI Fine-tuning alternatives & migration guides

How OpenAI Fine-tuning Pricing Compares

Software Starting Price Top Price
OpenAI Fine-tuning $3/per 1M tokens $25/per 1M tokens
Predibase $0.5/per million tokens $8/per million tokens
Together AI Fine-tuning $0.48/per 1M tokens $8/per 1M tokens
Lamini Custom Custom

OpenAI Fine-tuning Pricing FAQ

01 How is OpenAI Fine-tuning billed?

OpenAI Fine-tuning is billed per million training tokens consumed during the training job. The cost varies by model — for example, GPT-4.1-mini training is approximately $0.80/1M tokens while GPT-4o training is approximately $25.00/1M tokens. Inference on fine-tuned models is billed separately and typically carries a premium over the base model's inference rates.

02 Does OpenAI offer free fine-tuning?

OpenAI does not offer a free tier for fine-tuning. All training jobs are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis per token. You only pay for what you use with no minimum commitment, but there is no free quota for fine-tuning compute.

03 What is Reinforcement Fine-tuning and how does it differ in cost?

Reinforcement Fine-tuning (RFT) is an alternative to supervised fine-tuning that trains reasoning models like o4-mini using reward signals rather than labeled examples. Unlike supervised fine-tuning which is priced per training token, RFT is priced at $100 per hour of wall-clock time in the core training loop, prorated to the second.

04 Is OpenAI Fine-tuning being discontinued?

Yes. OpenAI began winding down self-serve fine-tuning on 2026-05-07. New organizations can no longer create training jobs. All customers will lose access to creating new fine-tuning jobs by 2027-01-06. Existing fine-tuned models and inference may continue under separate terms — check OpenAI's official announcements for the latest details.

Is this pricing incorrect? — we'll verify and update it.