o3-mini is OpenAI's compact reasoning model released January 2025, offering three effort levels (low, medium, high) to balance cost and quality. While largely superseded by o4-mini, it remains available and popular for STEM reasoning tasks at a competitive price.
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Pricing Breakdown
| Volume | Input Cost | Output Cost | Combined (50/50) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 tokens | $0.0011 | $0.0044 | $0.0027 |
| 10,000 tokens | $0.0110 | $0.0440 | $0.0275 |
| 100,000 tokens | $0.1100 | $0.4400 | $0.2750 |
| 1,000,000 tokens | $1.1000 | $4.4000 | $2.7500 |
Strengths
- ✓Strong reasoning at a low price point
- ✓200K context window
- ✓Three effort levels (low/medium/high) for cost control
- ✓Well-suited for STEM and coding tasks
Weaknesses
- ✗Superseded by o4-mini for most use cases
- ✗No image input support
Compare o3-mini With
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does o3-mini cost?
o3-mini costs $1.10/1M per 1M input tokens and $4.40/1M per 1M output tokens.
What is o3-mini's context window?
o3-mini has a context window of 200K tokens, which means it can process up to 200,000 tokens in a single request.
Is o3-mini open source?
No, o3-mini is a proprietary model by OpenAI and is not open source.
What is o3-mini best used for?
o3-mini is best suited for: reasoning, math, coding, low-cost. Strong reasoning at a low price point.
What is o3-mini's ELO score?
o3-mini has an ELO score of 1340 on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena leaderboard, placing it among top-tier models.