GPT-4.1 mini
Compact GPT-4.1 option for consistent tone and speed.
About GPT-4.1 mini
At roughly $0.31 per million tokens blended, GPT-4.1 mini delivers most of GPT-4.1's capability at about 20% of the cost — making it a strong default for teams that need real intelligence without full-model prices. Its 1 million token context window lets you feed in entire codebases, contracts, or conversation histories, and its near-half-second latency improvement over GPT-4o keeps interactive experiences feeling responsive. Developers particularly value its precise instruction following (84.1% on IFEval) and its vision capability, which holds up well against full GPT-4.1 for image-heavy workflows. Agentic pipelines and high-volume customer service deployments are where it consistently earns its keep. One genuine limitation worth knowing: accuracy degrades meaningfully at the far end of that 1M context window, dropping from around 84% at 8K tokens to roughly 50% at maximum capacity — so tasks that depend on retrieval across a truly massive document set may require chunking strategies or a stronger model.
Best for
- High-volume customer service and chatbot deployments where cost and speed are the primary constraints
- Long-document processing — contract analysis, paper summarization, and meeting transcripts up to 1M tokens
- Agentic workflows such as booking systems and multi-step routing tasks that need reliable tool calling
- Multimodal agents that combine image understanding with text, at a fraction of GPT-4.1's cost
- Code review assistance and lightweight development support for everyday coding tasks
Specs & capabilities
How GPT-4.1 mini stacks up — intelligence, speed, context, and modalities.
Intelligence
Low
Speed
Medium
Context window
1,000,000 tokens
Max output
32,768 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
May–June 2024
Frequently asked questions
What does GPT-4.1 mini cost?
Input is $0.40 per million tokens and output is $1.60 per million tokens. With prompt caching, input drops to $0.10 per million tokens. The blended effective rate works out to roughly $0.31 per million tokens.
How large is the context window?
1 million tokens — the same as full GPT-4.1. Keep in mind that retrieval accuracy drops noticeably at the very high end of that window, so it is best suited to documents well under the theoretical maximum.
Does it support images?
Yes. It accepts both text and image inputs and performs comparably to GPT-4.1 on vision tasks at a fraction of the price. It does not support audio input or output.
How does it compare to full GPT-4.1?
It costs about 80% less and responds faster, but trades off some reasoning depth and coding capability. On SWE-Bench Verified it scores 23.6% versus GPT-4.1's higher mark, and complex multi-step reasoning is less reliable.
Who should use GPT-4.1 mini instead of a larger model?
Teams building latency-sensitive products, high-throughput pipelines, or cost-constrained applications where a mid-tier model is good enough — especially instruction-following, document, and vision tasks.
What is its knowledge cutoff?
May to June 2024. It will not have awareness of events, model releases, or news after that point.