Is GPT-5.5 a good deal?
Whether anything in this catalogue beats GPT-5.5 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, Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher and costs less than GPT-5.5 for Balanced on LMArena, but it is not a drop-in. You would give up: context.
Inspect model evidence Compare differences & requirements
Claude Opus 5.5 scores 44.9 points higher and costs 29% less, but you would give up: context.
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1466.8
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$11.25/M
LMArena Elo · higher is better
Scale starts at 1040 Elo
1511.7
Effective $/M · Balanced · lower is better
$8.00/M
GPT-5.5 takes file, image, text, returns up to 128,000 tokens from a 1,050,000-token context, and is listed by 7 sellers.
Compared against 145 rated, priced models on this lens: nothing dominates it outright, 5 more dominate it but give something up. GPT-5.5 scores 1466.8 at $11.25 per million tokens for this mix.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | 1511.7 | $8.00/M | context |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 1503.2 | $10.00/M | context |
| Claude Opus 5 | 1502.1 | $10.00/M | context |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | 1497.0 | $3.00/M | context, max output |
| MiMo-V2.6-Pro | 1491.0 | $0.540/M | file |
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Constraint: replacements must preserve the model’s capabilities; any losses remain named trade-offs.
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