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GPT-4o mini: token counter & pricing

OpenAI · exact (uses official tokenizer) · pricing as of 2026-05-31.

Updated · By · Methodology

Provider
OpenAI
API model ID
gpt-4o-mini
Context window
128,000 tokens
Input price
$0.15 per 1M tokens
Output price
$0.60 per 1M tokens
Tokenizer accuracy
exact (uses official tokenizer)
Pricing as of
2026-05-31

Open the counter to count tokens for GPT-4o mini in real time.

What is GPT-4o mini?

GPT-4o mini is OpenAI's small, fast, cheap model, designed for high-volume workloads where GPT-4o is overkill. 17× cheaper than GPT-4o on input, 17× cheaper on output, while keeping the same o200k_base tokenizer and 128k context window.

How tokens are counted here

Token counts on this page come from o200k_base, the identical tokenizer full GPT-4o uses, computed locally with js-tiktoken. Your text stays in the browser and the count is exact, not an estimate. Because mini and GPT-4o tokenize identically, comparing the two is pure rate arithmetic: same count, different price per token, which is exactly what happens when you flip between them in the calculator above. The 17x price gap you see is the whole story; there is no hidden tokenization difference adding or removing cost.

When to use GPT-4o mini

When not to use it: anything requiring careful multi-step reasoning, structured planning, or nuanced instruction-following on subtle constraints. The quality gap to GPT-4o is real on these.

Pricing notes

At $0.15/$0.60 per million, GPT-4o mini is one of the cheapest frontier-tier models. Direct competitors:

For most price-sensitive workloads, the choice is GPT-4o mini vs Gemini Flash. Test both; the winner depends entirely on your prompt distribution.

What GPT-4o mini costs in production

The textbook mini deployment is a customer support chatbot. Each message carries about 2,000 input tokens (system prompt, conversation history, a retrieved help-center snippet) and gets a 300-token reply. At 500,000 messages per month, that is 1 billion input tokens and 150M output tokens.

Squeezing further, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite ($0.10 / $0.40) handles the same traffic for $100 + $60 = $160 per month, a third less. Going upmarket, Claude Haiku 4.5 ($1.00 / $5.00) costs $1,000 + $750 = $1,750 per month for identical volume, about 7x. For a support bot where most questions are routine, that spread usually funds a human escalation path instead.

Migrating from GPT-3.5 Turbo

OpenAI deprecated the gpt-3.5-turbo line in favor of mini, so this migration is often forced rather than chosen. Update the apiId from gpt-3.5-turbo to gpt-4o-mini. The tokenizer changes from cl100k_base to o200k_base, which yields roughly 5-10% fewer tokens for the same English text, so re-measure prompt budgets instead of porting old counts. The good news: o200k_base is the tokenizer for everything OpenAI ships now, GPT-4o through the GPT-5 family, so counts measured here carry forward to any future upgrade. Capability rises across the board; spot-check your edge cases anyway.

GPT-4o mini vs the obvious alternative

DeepSeek V3 ($0.27 / $1.10 via DeepSeek's own API) is the open-weight model most often benchmarked against mini: pricier per token than mini's $0.15 / $0.60, but strong on reasoning for the tier. The numbers and tradeoffs are laid out at DeepSeek V3 vs GPT-4o mini. Inside OpenAI's lineup, GPT-4o vs GPT-4o mini covers when the 17x premium is worth paying, and Claude Sonnet vs GPT-4o mini covers the cross-provider quality jump.

Common questions

Is GPT-4o mini just GPT-3.5 with new branding?

No. It's a distinct model with substantially better benchmark scores than the old gpt-3.5-turbo line, but priced at roughly 30% of the cost. OpenAI deprecated gpt-3.5-turbo in favor of mini.

Does mini support function calling and structured outputs?

Yes, same OpenAI features as GPT-4o (function calling, JSON mode, structured outputs with schema). The capability surface is the same; the only difference is reasoning quality on hard prompts.

What's a typical cost for a chat exchange?

A 500-token prompt with a 100-token reply: $0.000075 input + $0.00006 output = $0.000135 per call, or $135 per million calls. Use the calculator above with your real prompt for an accurate number.

Compare GPT-4o mini to other models

Detailed comparisons