OpenAI's fastest, cheapest option for everyday high-volume tasks.
High-volume everyday tasks where GPT-4o quality is overkill
You need strong reasoning or coding — GPT-5.2 Mini or DeepSeek V3 are better at similar or lower cost.
Compare every model's knowledge cutoff, max output, and context window.
GPT-4o Mini punches well above its price for classification, summarisation, and simple writing. It struggles when tasks get complex.
Extremely low cost at $0.15/1M input — among the cheapest OpenAI models
Very fast response times suitable for interactive user-facing apps
Strong enough for most writing, summarisation, and classification tasks
Noticeably weaker than GPT-5.2 Mini on complex reasoning and multi-step tasks
Not suitable for hard coding challenges or deep document research
DeepSeek V3 now offers better coding quality at comparable pricing
What people actually use GPT-4o Mini for.
Customer support and classification pipelines where speed and low cost matter more than frontier quality
Content drafting, summarisation, and editing at scale
Lightweight coding assistance and code explanation for simpler tasks
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs GPT-5.2 Mini — Against GPT-5.2 Mini (OpenAI), GPT-4o Mini runs about 88% cheaper per token and answers faster. Take GPT-4o Mini unless you specifically need what GPT-5.2 Mini does better.
vs GPT-5.6 Luna — Against GPT-5.6 Luna (OpenAI), GPT-4o Mini runs about 46% cheaper per token, gives up 8.2x on context and answers faster. Take GPT-4o Mini unless you specifically need what GPT-5.6 Luna does better.
vs GPT-6 Astra — Against GPT-6 Astra (OpenAI), GPT-4o Mini runs about 99% cheaper per token, gives up 8.2x on context and answers faster. Take GPT-4o Mini unless you specifically need what GPT-6 Astra does better.
Price History
→0% since May 30
90 data points · tracked daily since May 30, 2026
High-volume everyday tasks where GPT-4o quality is overkill. Start free — no card required.
Recommendations are made independently based on real-world use and public benchmarks. See our disclosures for details.
Similar models worth checking before you commit.
Lower-cost OpenAI model that keeps a solid balance of usefulness, speed, and affordability for everyday tasks.
The small, fast, cheap tier of the GPT-5.6 family — near-frontier scores on many benchmarks at commodity pricing after its ~80% July price cut.
OpenAI's September 3, 2026 frontier release — the first GPT-6 model and OpenAI's answer to Claude Fable 5.1 two days earlier. State of the art on computer use (OSWorld 2.0 72.6% in ~47% less time than GPT-5.6 Sol), agentic coding (Terminal-Bench 4.0 57.9%), and frontier math (FrontierMath Tier 4 97.6%). $10/$50 per 1M tokens, 1.05M context, 128K output, knowledge cutoff April 30, 2026.
GPT-4o Mini costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.6 per million output tokens on the API, with cached input at $0.075 per million. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $2.70 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
GPT-4o Mini has a 128k tokens context window, with up to 16k tokens of output per response. That is the total of prompt plus response the model can hold in one request.
GPT-4o Mini's training data runs through September 2023, and the model was released on July 18, 2024. For anything after that date it needs web search or documents in the prompt.
GPT-4o Mini is best for high-volume everyday tasks where gpt-4o quality is overkill. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around budget pricing and very fast speed.
You need strong reasoning or coding — GPT-5.2 Mini or DeepSeek V3 are better at similar or lower cost.
GPT-5.6 Terra (OpenAI) at $2.00/1M/1M input against GPT-4o Mini's $0.15/1M/1M. Best OpenAI value — near-flagship capability at 60% off. Compare it first if GPT-4o Mini's pricing is the thing stopping you.
GPT-5.2 Mini — fast against GPT-4o Mini's very fast, with 128k tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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