Which model is better: GPT-4.5 or GPT-4o Mini?

**GPT-4o Mini delivers an overwhelming cost and efficiency advantage over GPT-4.5.** It is 99.8% cheaper, costing $0.15 versus $75.00 for input and $0.60 versus $150.00 for output per 1M tokens. GPT-4o Mini also responds faster with a 220ms TTFT (630ms faster) and leads coding capabilities at 41.0% versus 38.0% on SWE-bench.
Verified daily via automated API latency tests and official documentation.

Verified Performance & Unit Economics Delta

Daily synchronized metrics from synthetic latency endpoints and benchmark evaluations.

Metric / Dimension GPT-4.5 GPT-4o Mini Net Delta / Advantage
Input Cost / 1M Tokens $75.00 $0.15 GPT-4o Mini is 500.0x cheaper
Output Cost / 1M Tokens $150.00 $0.60 GPT-4o Mini (99.6% lower)
Prompt Cache Read / 1M $37.500 $0.075 GPT-4o Mini is 500.0x cheaper
Prompt Cache Write / 1M $75.00 $0.15 GPT-4o Mini is 500.0x cheaper
Avg TTFT Response Latency 850ms 220ms GPT-4o Mini (+630ms faster)
SWE-bench Verified (Coding) 38% 41% GPT-4o Mini (+3.0% lead)
Inference Value Score (IVR) 22.1 / 100 70.6 / 100 GPT-4o Mini (+48.5 pts)

Interactive Monthly Token Economics & ROI Forecaster

Model your expected production workload across prompt (input) and completion (output) tokens with prompt caching economics.

Live Calculation Engine
10.0M Tokens
100K 50M 250M 500M+
2.5M Tokens
100K 10M 50M 100M+

Estimated Monthly Spend

GPT-4.5 $1,125.00

$75.00/1M in · $150.00/1M out

Prompt Cache: $37.500/1M read · $75.00/1M write

GPT-4o Mini $3.00

$0.15/1M in · $0.60/1M out

Prompt Cache: $0.075/1M read · $0.15/1M write

Projected Monthly Cost Reduction
$1,122.00 / mo
(99.7% lower cost with GPT-4o Mini)
A

When to Choose GPT-4.5

Choose GPT-4.5 when you need Deep world-knowledge synthesis, high-EQ conversational nuance, and long-form creative generation requiring massive pretraining breadth. and have an infrastructure budget aligned with $75.00/1M tokens.

B

When to Choose GPT-4o Mini

Choose GPT-4o Mini when you need Ultra-affordable, low-latency multimodal model optimized for high-volume customer queries, fine-tuning, and structured JSON extraction. and prioritize OpenAI ecosystem integration at $0.15/1M tokens.

Related Questions & Decision Factors

Which is cheaper: GPT-4.5 or GPT-4o Mini?

GPT-4o Mini is cheaper at $0.15/1M input tokens compared to $75.00/1M for GPT-4.5.

Which model has lower latency: GPT-4.5 or GPT-4o Mini?

GPT-4o Mini delivers faster response times with an average TTFT of 220ms vs 850ms for GPT-4.5.

When should you choose GPT-4.5?

Choose GPT-4.5 when you need Deep world-knowledge synthesis, high-EQ conversational nuance, and long-form creative generation requiring massive pretraining breadth. and have an infrastructure budget aligned with $75.00/1M tokens.

When should you choose GPT-4o Mini?

Choose GPT-4o Mini when you need Ultra-affordable, low-latency multimodal model optimized for high-volume customer queries, fine-tuning, and structured JSON extraction. and prioritize OpenAI ecosystem integration at $0.15/1M tokens.

Explore Related Model Matchups