GPT-5 Mini, the OpenAI model in numbers

Overview

Released on August 7, 2025, GPT-5 Mini is one of the 16 OpenAI models tracked on this site. It is a closed model: you access it through an API, from OpenAI or one of the 36 providers listed on models.dev. It has a reasoning mode: it can "think" before answering, which helps with multi-step problems but uses more tokens, and therefore more money. That makes it more than a year old: successors may have shipped since.

We file it under budget models (24 models in this category on the site).

Benchmark results

According to results published by Epoch AI (checked on October 22, 2026), GPT-5 Mini has a capability index of 62.9 out of 100, computed on 5 benchmarks from our basket.

It is not among the top 30 of the weekly ranking.

• GPQA Diamond (PhD-level science questions): 75% — the best tracked model, Gemini 4 Argon, reaches 96.4%
• OTIS Mock AIME (competition mathematics problems): 86.7% — the best tracked model, GPT-5.5 Pro, reaches 100%
• FrontierMath (very hard research-level mathematics): 46.7% — the best tracked model, GPT-6 Astra, reaches 93.7%
• SWE-bench Verified (fixing real software bugs): 64.7% — the best tracked model, Claude Opus 4.7, reaches 83.5%

Context and capabilities

Its context window reaches 272,000 tokens, roughly 408 pages of text at 500 words per page: enough for a long report or several contracts at once. A single answer can run to 8,192 tokens.

It accepts as input: text and image. Its knowledge stops at May 30, 2024: beyond that, it needs web search or your documents.

It can call tools (functions, APIs) and return structured JSON output, which makes it a possible foundation for an AI agent.

Pricing and budget

GPT-5 Mini costs $0.25 per million input tokens and $2 per million output tokens (median of 36 providers, checked on October 22, 2026).

To put it in perspective: reading 20,000 tokens (about thirty pages) and writing 2,000 costs roughly $0.009; a thousand of those tasks, $9.

That is 1.8 times the median output price of budget models ($1.13).

To estimate your own budget, use the agent cost calculator.

Who is it for?

Given its category, GPT-5 Mini is mainly aimed at high volumes where every cent counts: sorting, information extraction, summaries, simple assistants.

Before adopting it, test it on your own examples: benchmarks measure standard tasks, not your job.

Alternatives

In the same category, the models closest to GPT-5 Mini are:

• Qwen3.5 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 62.6) — see the comparison
• Qwen3.7 Flash (Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), index 63.7) — see the comparison
• Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite (Google DeepMind, index 64.3) — see the comparison
• GPT-5.4 nano (OpenAI, index 71.7) — see the comparison