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GPT-5 mini

GPT-5's mid-tier sibling, most of the quality at a fraction of the price, ideal for high-volume production workloads.

Updated

Quick facts

Released
Aug 2025
Context
400K tokens
Output / 1M
$2.00 / 1M tokens
License
Proprietary

About GPT-5 mini

GPT-5 mini hits the sweet spot most production stacks default to: roughly 80% of GPT-5's quality at roughly 20% of the cost. It uses the same Responses API, supports tool use, and ships with the same training cutoff and safety profile.

For RAG, customer support, content classification, and most agent steps that don't require deep reasoning, mini is the right pick. Reach for full GPT-5 only when a benchmark you care about or a hard task demands it.

The mini variant is also the default for OpenAI's Realtime voice API tier that prioritises latency.

Benchmarks

Published scores from OpenAI's model card or independent leaderboards. We do not publish numbers we cannot source, see methodology.

HumanEval
,
Python coding pass@1
MMLU
,
Broad academic knowledge
GPQA
,
Graduate-level reasoning
SWE-bench
,
Real software-engineering tasks
Benchmark scores not yet available. We only publish numbers we can source from official model cards or independent leaderboards, see methodology.

Capabilities

Strengths

  • Excellent price-quality ratio for production workloads
  • Fast first-token latency
  • Same tool-use API surface as flagship
  • Generous context window

Tracked weaknesses

  • Quality gap vs. flagship visible on hard reasoning
  • Limited agentic depth on multi-step tool tasks

Pricing

Per-million-token rates as published by OpenAI.

TierPriceNotes
Input$0.25 / 1M tokensTokens you send to the model
Output$2.00 / 1M tokensTokens the model generates
Context400K tokensMax combined input + output

Call GPT-5 mini from your code

Drop-in snippet for the OpenAI SDK. Set your API key in the environment and run.

typescript
import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  // Use OPENAI_API_KEY for OpenAI, or your provider's key + baseURL.
  apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY,
});

const completion = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gpt-5-mini",
  messages: [
    { role: "user", content: "What's the time complexity of quicksort?" },
  ],
});

console.log(completion.choices[0].message.content);

Best for

Tasks where GPT-5 mini ranks among LLMDex's top picks.

Compare GPT-5 mini with…

Frequently asked

  • How much does GPT-5 mini cost per million tokens?
    GPT-5 mini is priced at $0.25 / 1M tokens for input tokens and $2.00 / 1M tokens for output tokens via the official OpenAI API at the time of writing.
  • What is GPT-5 mini's context window?
    GPT-5 mini supports a context window of 400K tokens with up to 128K output tokens per response.
  • Is GPT-5 mini open source?
    No. GPT-5 mini is a closed-weight model, you can use it via OpenAI's API but the model weights are not publicly downloadable.
  • When was GPT-5 mini released?
    GPT-5 mini was released on Aug 7, 2025 by OpenAI.
  • What is GPT-5 mini's knowledge cutoff?
    GPT-5 mini's training data has a knowledge cutoff of Sep 2024. For information after that date you'll need a tool-use or web-search wrapper.
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