Is GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) a good deal?

As of Oct 6, 2026, GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GPT-6 Luna scores 105.1 higher and costs 24% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.

Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements

GPT-6 Luna is both better and cheaper than GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18): 105.1 points higher on LMArena and 24% less per million tokens, $0.063 cheaper at this mix.

GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) takes text, image, file, returns up to 16,384 tokens from a 128,000-token context, and is listed by 1 seller.

Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: 2 models dominate it and give up nothing, 5 more dominate it but give something up. GPT-4o-mini (2024-07-18) scores 1286.4 at $0.263 per million tokens for this mix.

Envelope-safe replacements

Each row scores at least as high, costs no more, and covers this model’s context, output, modalities, tools, and reasoning. A cheaper narrower model is not listed here.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You save
GPT-6 Luna	1391.5 +105.1	$0.200/M	24%
GPT-5 Nano	1320.0 +33.6	$0.138/M	48%

Higher score, lower price, named losses

Not a drop-in. The loss is why these are not a recommendation.

Model	LMArena	Effective $/M	You give up
GLM 5.3 Flash	1469.6	$0.238/M	file
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	1462.5	$0.182/M	file
MiMo-V2.6-Flash	1456.4	$0.175/M	file
Gemma 4 31B	1443.4	$0.205/M	file
Hy3	1440.7	$0.231/M	image, file

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