What the OpenAI API actually costs in Brazilian reais

By LW Forge — maintainer of LLM Scout · Updated August 31, 2026

Every OpenAI price you'll read is a dollar price. If you're paying from Brazil, that number is the beginning of the calculation, not the end. Between the list price and what actually leaves your account sit three layers: the exchange rate, the IOF on the currency conversion, and — if you're a company deducting the expense — the import taxes on a service bought abroad. Individuals stop after the second layer. Companies rarely do, and the gap between the two is large enough to change which model you should be running.

Layer one: the exchange rate you actually get

The dollar closed around R$ 5.08 in early August 2026, but that commercial rate isn't the one on your statement. Credit card issuers convert at their own quoted rate, typically the commercial rate plus a spread of roughly 1% to 2% for international purchases. So a US$ 100 charge converts at something closer to R$ 5.13–5.18, not R$ 5.08.

This is the volatile layer, and it moves more than OpenAI's prices do. The dollar has swung several percent inside a single quarter more than once — enough that a budget locked in January can be wrong by August without anyone changing a line of code. Any cost projection you make in reais should be a range, not a number.

Layer two: IOF, which everyone forgets

The IOF on credit, debit and prepaid card transactions in foreign currency is 3.5%, applied to the converted value in reais. That rate came from the May 2025 fiscal adjustment (up from 3.38%) and was reaffirmed in 2025; it applies regardless of card type.

Combine both layers and the effective multiplier on a dollar list price is about R$ 5.26 to R$ 5.36 per US$ 1.00 — call it R$ 5.30. Here is what OpenAI's August 2026 prices look like through that lens, per million tokens:

Those Terra and Luna figures are new. OpenAI cut Luna by 80% and Terra by 20% on 30 July 2026, so any Brazilian cost estimate written before August is quoting numbers that no longer exist. Price your own token volumes in the OpenAI cost calculator, which carries a currency toggle for reais.

Layer three: import taxes, if you're a company

Here is where the arithmetic stops being simple. A Brazilian company paying a foreign software provider is importing a service, and that triggers a stack of federal and municipal taxes rather than a single rate:

• IRRF — withholding income tax, generally 15%, rising to 25% if the provider is domiciled in a jurisdiction Brazil treats as a tax haven.
• PIS/COFINS-Importação — 1.65% and 7.6%, calculated on a grossed-up base rather than on the raw invoice value.
• ISS — municipal, typically 2% to 5% depending on your city.
• CIDE — 10%, when the contract involves technology transfer; whether a metered API call qualifies is a question for your accountant, not for a blog post.
• IOF/câmbio — 3.5% on the exchange operation, unchanged by the 2026 tax reform, which phases out PIS, COFINS and IPI from 2027 and ICMS and ISS from 2033 but leaves IOF standing.

The important structural detail is the gross-up: several of these are calculated on a base that already includes other taxes, so the rates do not simply add up. Depending on your municipality, contract structure and whether CIDE applies, the total burden on an imported service commonly lands somewhere between 25% and 50% on top of the invoice — and part of it may be recoverable as credit depending on your tax regime. That range is wide on purpose. This is not a calculation to do from a table on the internet; it is a conversation with your accountant, and the numbers here are meant to tell you the question is worth asking, not to answer it for you.

For an individual or a small operation paying by card and not deducting anything, layer three simply doesn't exist. Your multiplier is the R$ 5.30 above and that's the whole story.

A worked example: a support chatbot

Take the standard shape: 10,000 conversations a month, eight exchanges each, roughly 1,500 input and 200 output tokens per request. That's 80,000 requests — 120M input and 16M output tokens.

The 35% is a midpoint of the range above, used here to show the shape of the problem rather than to predict your invoice. Two things stand out. First, the model choice dominates everything: the spread between Sol and Luna is 25x, while the entire currency-and-tax layer is a multiplier of roughly 1.4x. Optimizing the model tier is an order of magnitude more valuable than optimizing the payment method. Second, R$ 229 a month for a working support chatbot is a genuinely small number — the reason these projects get killed in Brazil is usually a flagship model chosen by default, not the exchange rate.

For the full scenario math on chat workloads, see what a chatbot really costs to run. If you're weighing API access against a ChatGPT Plus subscription — which is billed in dollars too, and carries the same IOF — the breakeven is worked out in API vs subscription.

Practical ways to shrink the reais number

Pick the tier by evaluation, not by reputation. After the July repricing, Luna costs R$ 1.06 per million input tokens against Sol's R$ 26.50. Run both against your own test set before assuming you need the flagship.

Use the Batch API for anything not interactive. A 50% discount applies to the dollar figure before every other layer, so it compounds through the exchange rate, the IOF and the tax stack alike.

Cache the stable prefix. Cached input reads bill at roughly 10% of the input rate, which on a long system prompt is usually a larger saving than switching providers — prompt caching savings has the arithmetic.

Budget in dollars, monitor in reais. Set your spending cap in the OpenAI dashboard, which is denominated in dollars, and track the reais figure separately so a currency swing shows up as a currency swing rather than as a mysterious cost increase.

Compare the whole market, not just OpenAI. The same three layers apply to every foreign provider, so relative rankings survive the conversion intact — the cheapest LLM APIs of 2026 still holds in reais.

Every price on this site comes from a stated source, listed on the sources page, and the exchange rate is fetched live rather than typed in. Tax rates, though, are the one part of this you should verify with a professional — they vary by municipality and by how your contract is written.