GPT-4.1 mini
Fast / cheapLast verified: June 2026· OpenAI GPT-4.1 mini pricing
Smaller long-context model. Confirm current pricing with OpenAI.
- Input / 1M
- $0.40
- Output / 1M
- $1.60
- Context
- 1M tokens
- Provider
- OpenAI
Pricing verified June 2026. Prices change frequently. Always confirm against the provider’s official pricing page before relying on these figures for budgeting. Official pricing →
When to choose GPT-4.1 mini
The cheapest way to get a 1M-token window on the OpenAI stack, at $0.40 in and $1.60 out. The window is the entire case for it. Below 128K there are cheaper rows in this table that do the same work; above it, this is where long-prompt, high-volume traffic can live without prompt size itself becoming the budget problem. Validate it on your longest real prompts rather than your average ones, because the long tail is the regime you are buying.
GPT-4.1 mini sits close enough to GPT-4o mini on price that the two are usually decided together. That comparison is written once, on the models table, rather than argued twice from opposite sides.
What GPT-4.1 mini costs in practice
The 50M/10M month is $36 and one request that fills the entire context costs 40 cents of input. Set against the rest of the fast tier those are middling figures rather than cheap ones: GPT-4o mini does the same month for $13.50 and Llama 3.3 70B for $16, both inside 128K. At $0.70 per million blended it is the fourth cheapest row in this table. Whether the premium over those two is worth paying is a question about your prompt-length distribution, and it should be answerable from traces rather than from intuition.
| Scenario | Input / mo | Output / mo | Est. cost / mo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prototype | 2M | 0.5M | $2 |
| Growing product | 50M | 10M | $36 |
| At scale | 500M | 100M | $360 |
Plug in your own numbers with the cost calculator.
Where GPT-4.1 mini fits in a routing setup
Below this row almost every cheaper option gives the large context up; the exception is Gemini 2.5 Flash, which keeps 1M at $40 on the reference month against $36 here, close enough that the choice between the two is a quality question rather than a price one. Above it, Claude Haiku 4.5 at $100 is the nearest volume tier on another vendor, and it trades the context back down to 200K. Anything that fits comfortably inside 128K should not be on this row at all.
Cheaper alternatives to GPT-4.1 mini
The models immediately below GPT-4.1 mini on blended cost, nearest first. A swap only pays if quality holds on the routes you move — see the LLM cost optimization playbook for how to prove that before you move them.
Frequently asked questions
How much does GPT-4.1 mini cost?
GPT-4.1 mini bills $0.40 per million input tokens and $1.60 per million output tokens — $0.70 per million blended at a three-to-one input:output split. A workload of 50M input and 10M output tokens per month works out at about $36. Confirm current pricing with the provider.
What is GPT-4.1 mini's context window?
GPT-4.1 mini has a 1M-token context window. One request that fills the whole window costs about $0.40 at the input rate, before the reply is billed.
Where does GPT-4.1 mini sit on price?
At $0.70 per million blended — three input tokens for every output token — GPT-4.1 mini is dearer than 3 of the 19 models tracked here and cheaper than 15. Output bills at 4x the input rate, and the nearest cheaper model on this table is DeepSeek-V3 at $0.48 blended.
Related concepts: context window, model routing, prompt caching, evals.