GPT-5 mini

OpenAI·Aug 2025reasoningproprietary

GPT-5 mini is the small, high-throughput member of the GPT-5 family. It handles classification, extraction, summarization and routine chat at $0.25 per million input tokens, and still supports reasoning effort settings and the full 400K context. For pipelines that process millions of documents, the 90% cache discount makes repeated-prefix workloads extremely cheap.

Benchmark results

Where it shines

  • Excellent cost efficiency for high-volume pipelines
  • Full 400K context at a budget price
  • Supports reasoning effort and tool calling like its big sibling

Alternatives to GPT-5 mini

Qwen3-Max

Alibaba's trillion-parameter API flagship — frontier-adjacent quality with strong agentic tool use at mid-tier prices.

Gemini 3 Pro

Google's November 2025 frontier breakout — 91.9% GPQA Diamond and 37.5% HLE made it the reasoning leader of its generation.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google's 2025 workhorse flagship — first mainstream thinking model with a 1M context, still widely deployed.

DeepSeek V3.2

The sparse-attention release that halved DeepSeek's already-lowest-in-class prices while keeping GPT-class quality.

Frequently asked questions

How much does the GPT-5 mini API cost?
GPT-5 mini costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens, with cached input at $0.03 per million. A workload of 10M input and 1.5M output tokens per month costs about $5.50.
What is the context window of GPT-5 mini?
GPT-5 mini supports a context window of 400,000 tokens (400K), with up to 128K output tokens per response.
Is GPT-5 mini open source?
No — GPT-5 mini is a proprietary model available through OpenAI's API and partner platforms.
What are the best alternatives to GPT-5 mini?
The closest alternatives by overall capability are Qwen3-Max, Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2. See the comparison pages for detailed head-to-head breakdowns.