GPT-4o mini
Agile, cost-efficient 4o variant ideal for everyday conversation.
About GPT-4o mini
At $0.15 per million input tokens, GPT-4o mini occupies a sweet spot that the frontier models simply cannot match on cost — more than 60% cheaper than its predecessor GPT-3.5 Turbo while outperforming it across the board. It earned that reputation because the benchmarks back it up: 87.2% on HumanEval makes it a capable coding assistant, and its 128K context window lets it chew through long documents without losing the thread. Users regularly reach for it in high-volume, cost-sensitive workflows — customer support automation, document extraction, content drafting — where running a heavier model would be prohibitively expensive at scale. The low time-to-first-token (1.23 seconds) keeps interactions feeling responsive. The honest caveat: its overall intelligence ranking sits below the median on comparative benchmarks, and its output generation speed of 54.6 tokens per second lags well behind faster alternatives. It also has a knowledge cutoff of October 2023, so anything that happened after that is outside its awareness. For tasks where raw capability matters less than throughput and price, GPT-4o mini is the practical, no-drama choice.
Best for
- High-volume customer support chatbots and help desk systems where cost-per-request is a hard constraint
- Code generation and debugging — strong HumanEval performance (87.2%) makes it reliable for day-to-day coding tasks
- Document processing at scale: extracting structured data from receipts, invoices, and long-form text up to 128K tokens
- Content drafting — email composition, summaries, and writing assistance where turnaround matters more than depth
- Scalable API integrations where structured JSON output and batch pricing (50% off via Batch API) reduce infrastructure costs
Specs & capabilities
How GPT-4o mini stacks up — intelligence, speed, context, and modalities.
Intelligence
Low
Speed
Medium
Context window
128,000 tokens
Max output
16,384 tokens
Knowledge cutoff
October 1, 2023
GPT‑4o retirement (ChatGPT)
OpenAI retired GPT‑4o inside ChatGPT on February 13, 2026. It remains available through the OpenAI API.
Frequently asked questions
How much does GPT-4o mini cost?
Input is $0.15 per million tokens and output is $0.60 per million tokens. Using the Batch API for non-time-sensitive work cuts those prices in half: $0.075 input, $0.30 output.
What is the context window?
128,000 input tokens with a maximum of 16,384 output tokens per response — large enough to handle lengthy documents or extended multi-turn conversations in a single call.
What are its main limitations?
Its intelligence index ranks below average compared to other models, and its token generation speed (54.6 t/s) is notably slower than the median. Its knowledge cutoff is October 2023, so it has no awareness of events after that date.
How does it compare to GPT-4o?
GPT-4o mini is significantly cheaper and faster to first token, but trades off overall reasoning depth and benchmark performance. It's the right pick when volume and cost dominate; GPT-4o is better when task complexity demands it.
Can it understand images?
Yes — it accepts both text and image inputs. However, image analysis can be inconsistent for certain visual types (traffic scenes, architectural detail, weather patterns), and full vision parity with GPT-4o is still evolving.
Who is this model best suited for?
Developers and teams running high-volume applications where cost efficiency is the priority — think customer service bots, automated pipelines, document parsing, or any product that makes thousands of model calls per day.