o4-mini vs GPT-5.2

Detailed pricing comparison and cost analysis.

Updated March 2026

Cost Simulator

o4-mini Cost
$1.98
GPT-5.2 Cost
$4.55
o4-mini is 56% cheaper
Featureo4-miniGPT-5.2
ProviderOpenAIOpenAI
Input Price (1M)$1.10$1.75
Output Price (1M)$4.40$14.00
Context Window200,000128,000

Verdict

o4-mini costs $1.10 per 1M input tokens and $4.40 per 1M output tokens. GPT-5.2 costs $1.75 per 1M input tokens and $14.00 per 1M output tokens. o4-mini is 37% cheaper on input tokens than GPT-5.2. For output tokens, o4-mini is the more affordable option at $4.40/1M vs $14.00.

On context window, o4-mini supports 200,000 tokens — meaning it can fit more conversation history, documents, or code in a single request. This matters for RAG pipelines, long document analysis, and agentic workflows where context builds up over many turns.

When to choose o4-mini

  • ✓ You need the lowest input token cost ($ 1.10/1M)
  • ✓ Your workload is output-heavy — o4-mini generates text cheaper
  • ✓ You need a larger context window (200,000 tokens)
  • ✓ You are already integrated with OpenAI

When to choose GPT-5.2

  • ✓ You are already integrated with OpenAI

Use the calculator above to simulate your specific workload and find the exact break-even point. For most applications, the cheapest model is the one that minimises your total monthly bill given your input-to-output token ratio.