gpt-oss-120b
OpenAI released 2025-08-05 apache-2.0
Solar Pro 4 is both better and cheaper.
It scores +17.5 higher and costs 25% less ($0.052/M against $0.070/M) on this workload — and it does everything this model does.
Ling-3.0-flash is cheaper still (55% less) but drops 131K → 33K max output.
Our take
editorial — not a measurementOpenAI's Apache-2.0 open-weight model, and at roughly $0.037/$0.17 on OpenRouter's default endpoint it is one of the cheapest credible models available. The strategic value is licence, not benchmark: Apache-2.0 with no field-of-use restriction means you can self-host, fine-tune and ship it commercially without asking anyone. Treat listed prices as one host's rate — Groq, Fireworks, Together and DeepInfra all price the same weights differently, and self-hosting changes the economics entirely.
Strengths
- Apache-2.0 — genuinely unrestricted commercial use
- ~$0.037/$0.17 at the default hosted endpoint
- 131k context window
- Self-hostable, so no vendor lock-in or rate limits
Weaknesses
- Well below frontier capability
- Text-only
- Quoted price is one host's rate, not a canonical price
Reach for it when
- Cost-floor workloads
- On-prem or air-gapped deployment
- Fine-tuning bases where licence matters
Avoid it if
- You need frontier reasoning
- You need multimodal input
Sources: openrouter.ai
Every price dimension
| Input | $0.037/M |
|---|---|
| Output | $0.170/M |
Independent scores
| Intelligence | 24.1 |
|---|---|
| Coding | 30.4 |
| Agentic | 13.4 |
| LMArena Elo | 1365.6default |
Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.
Capability
| Context window | 131K |
|---|---|
| Max output | 131K |
| Input modes | text |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | always on |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2024-06-30 |
| Open weights | yes |
Provenance
| Price source | openrouter.ai |
|---|---|
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |
gpt-oss-120b is an open-weight, 117B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model from OpenAI designed for high-reasoning, agentic, and general-purpose production use cases. It activates 5.1B parameters per forward pass and is optimized...