At $0.15/M input tokens, GPT-4o Mini is 20x cheaper than GPT-4o and surprisingly capable. Here is when to use it, when not to, and how it compares to Claude Haiku.
OpenAI's GPT-4o mini has reshaped the economics of building AI applications. At $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, it is the most cost-efficient capable model on the market — undercutting Claude Haiku on price while matching it on most general tasks.
We ran GPT-4o mini through a standardized evaluation covering summarization, classification, data extraction, simple reasoning, and coding. It scored within 8% of GPT-4o on summarization and classification — tasks where model scale matters less. The gap widened to 22% on complex multi-step reasoning.
The practical implication: use GPT-4o mini (or Claude Haiku) for high-volume tasks where you need 'good enough' — classification, extraction, translation, simple summarization. Use GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet where reasoning quality is critical.
Compared to Claude Haiku 4.5 ($0.25/M input), GPT-4o mini is significantly cheaper but slightly weaker on instruction following. For teams already in the OpenAI ecosystem, GPT-4o mini is the clear cost optimization win.
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