Is GPT-5 Mini a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats GPT-5 Mini on both quality and price, and what you give up if it does. A computation on the current catalogue, not an opinion.
12 undominated of 145 · Oct 6, 2026
As of Oct 6, 2026, GPT-5 Mini is dominated for Balanced on LMArena. GPT-5.6 Luna scores 57.8 higher and costs 35% less, with a covering envelope. 12 of 145 rated, priced standard models are undominated.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
GPT-5.6 Luna is both better and cheaper than GPT-5 Mini: 57.8 points higher on LMArena and 35% less per million tokens, $0.238 cheaper at this mix.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1373.2
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.688/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1431.0
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$0.450/M
GPT-5 Mini takes text, image, file, returns up to 128,000 tokens from a 400,000-token context, and is listed by 4 sellers.
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-5 Mini scores 1373.2 at $0.688 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-5.6 Luna | 1431.0 +57.8 | $0.450/M | 35% |
| GPT-6 Luna | 1391.5 +18.3 | $0.200/M | 71% |
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| MiMo-V2.6-Pro | 1491.0 | $0.540/M | file |
| GLM 5.3 Flash | 1469.6 | $0.238/M | file |
| MiMo-V2.5-Pro | 1465.0 | $0.544/M | image, file |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 1462.5 | $0.182/M | file |
| MiMo-V2.6-Flash | 1456.4 | $0.175/M | file |
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