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GPT-5 vs GPT-5 mini

Side-by-side pricing, capabilities, real-world cost across common scenarios, and our editorial pick.

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all prices in USD per 1M tokens

GPT-5

OpenAI · released 2026-01-15

Quality (AA Index)91
Input price$1.25
Output price$10.00
Context400K
Throughput120 tok/s
P50 latency0.7s
OVERALL WINNER

GPT-5 mini

OpenAI · released 2026-01-15

Quality (AA Index)84
Input price$0.25
Output price$2.00
Context400K
Throughput280 tok/s
P50 latency0.3s

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Head-to-head specs

Green column = winner per metric
MetricGPT-5GPT-5 miniVerdict
Input price
/1M tokens
$1.25$0.25GPT-5 mini −80%
Output price
/1M tokens
$10.00$2.00GPT-5 mini −80%
Context window
max input length
400K400KTied
AA Quality
AA Intelligence Index (0–100)
9184GPT-5 +7pt
Arena Elo
LMArena human-pref Elo (800–2000)
Tied
Throughput
tokens per second
120280GPT-5 mini +133%
P50 latency
first token
0.7s0.3sGPT-5 mini −57%
Vision
multimodal
Tied
Function calling
tool use
Tied
Reasoning mode
chain-of-thought
Tied

Monthly cost across common scenarios

Default usage assumptions
ScenarioGPT-5GPT-5 mini
customer support
1000K req · 600/180 tok
$2.5K$510
chat with docs
300K req · 4000/300 tok
$2.4K$480
code generation
500K req · 2000/500 tok
$3.8K$750
voice assistant
600K req · 800/200 tok
$1.8K$360
Our pick

For most workloads, choose GPT-5 mini.

  • 80% cheaper input price, which compounds at scale
  • 133% faster throughput — matters for streaming UX and voice agents

GPT-5 family inheritance at a fraction of the cost — strong on routine tasks but visibly weaker on multi-step reasoning. Default choice when GPT-5 is overkill.

Choose GPT-5 instead if: Best across-the-board quality but the most expensive token rate in the table; pick GPT-5 when reasoning depth or function-calling reliability outranks per-million-token spend.

Read our deep analysis

Why pick? Use both with smart routing

Phase 2 · gateway with fallback chain

Set GPT-5 mini as primary, GPT-5 as fallback. One key, one bill, automatic failover when GPT-5 mini errors.

PHASE 2 PREVIEW · gateway not live yetThis endpoint does not exist yet. The gateway is in Phase 2 — what you see below is a design preview of the planned interface, not a live API. We will email subscribers when it launches.
Preview the planned API call
$ curl https://api.aipricly.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $AIPC_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "routing": {
      "primary": "openai/gpt-5-mini",
      "fallback": ["openai/gpt-5"]
    },
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "..."}]
  }'

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