Roboflow
OpenAI

OpenAI: GPT-5 Mini

GPT-5 Mini Overview

GPT-5 Mini, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is a mid-tier variant of the GPT-5 family that balances cost, speed, and capability. It is multimodal, supporting both text and image inputs, and offers a substantial input context window of ~400,000 tokens with output lengths up to ~128,000 tokens. While less powerful than the full GPT-5, it inherits its safety tuning, instruction-following improvements, and multimodal reasoning, making it a practical choice for developers who need large context handling without the expense of premium models.

GPT-5 Mini is optimized for affordability while retaining strong reasoning performance. Benchmarks show it outperforming earlier models such as GPT-4o on many multimodal and medical VQA tasks, though it lags behind GPT-5 on the most complex problems. Ideal use cases include prototyping, scalable content generation, document analysis, and mid-range reasoning tasks where efficiency and context capacity matter more than top-tier accuracy.

GPT-5 Mini Interactive Demo

GPT-5 Mini Details & Performance

Details

Resources

Vision Tasks

CaptioningChart Question AnsweringClassificationDocument Question AnsweringImage TaggingMulti-Label ClassificationOCRObject DetectionVision LanguageVisual Question Answering

Features

Foundation VisionLLMs with Vision CapabilitiesMultimodal Vision

Usage

Past 30 Days

Performance

Avg. Latency

Arena Rankings

GPT-5 Mini Vision Evals

GPT-5 Mini has not yet been evaluated on the current benchmark. The results below are from the legacy version of Vision Evals, our previous benchmark. See the current Vision Evals

Visual Understanding

77 models · 67 tasks
HighestLowest
This model#15 of 7773.13% pass rate · better than 81%
Score73.13%pass rate across 67 tasks
Speed11.72savg response per task
Cost$0.0006 / task$0.250 in · $2.00 out / 1M
Tokens1.8K / task1.4K in · 143 out
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
Spatial Understanding17 / 19
89.5%
Object Understanding12 / 14
85.7%
Defect Detection12 / 15
80%
Document Understanding7 / 9
77.8%
Object Counting1 / 10
10%
HighestLowest
This model#31 of 5876.86% pass rate · better than 47%
Score76.86%pass rate across 229 tasks
Speed4.63savg response per task
Cost$0.0004 / task$0.250 in · $2.00 out / 1M
Tokens377 / task105 in · 209 out
Score key:≥75%40–74%<40%
CategoryPassedScore
License Plate Recognition28 / 30
93.3%
Text Recognition24 / 30
80%
VQA & Extraction47 / 60
78.3%
Focused Scene OCR72 / 99
72.7%
Handwritten Math5 / 10
50%

Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology

View all legacy Vision Evals results →

GPT-5 Mini Pricing

GPT-5 Mini costs $0.250 per 1M input tokens and $2.00 per 1M output tokens.

Input$0.250 / 1M tokens
Output$2.00 / 1M tokens
Cached input$0.025 / 1M tokens

Pricing updated Aug 12, 2026

Price vs. performance

Estimated cost per task vs. Visual Understanding score, for this model and others ranked near it. Upper-left is the sweet spot (high quality, low cost). Based on Vision Evals (legacy) results.

11 of 11 models plotted

ModelScoreMedian tokensEst. cost / taskCompare
QwenQwen3.5 122B A10B76.1%1.2K$0.0004Compare
OpenAIGPT-5.6 Terra76.1%1.5K$0.0017Compare
OpenAIGPT-5.6 Sol76.1%1.5K$0.0073Compare
GoogleGemini 3.1 Pro75.8%1.1K$0.0024Compare
GoogleGemini 3 Flash74.6%1.4K$0.0014Compare
OpenAIGPT-5 Mini(this model)73.1%1.8K$0.0006
QwenQwen3.5 27B71.6%1.2K$0.0002Compare
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 570.2%2.2K$0.0048Compare
AnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.670.2%2.3K$0.0080Compare
OpenAIGPT-5.6 Luna70.2%1.5K$0.0002Compare
GoogleGemini 2.5 Pro70.2%856$0.0060Compare

Alternatives to GPT-5 Mini

Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.

Google
Gemini 3 Flash
Gemini 3 Flash is a proprietary multimodal large language model developed by Google through Google DeepMind, designed to deliver fast, cost-efficient reasoning across real-time products and developer workflows. Released in December 2025, it is the Flash-tier variant of the Gemini 3 family, balancing low latency with reasoning quality approaching Pro models.The model supports text, images, audio, and video, with an exceptionally large context window of roughly one million input tokens and outputs up to ~65k tokens. It emphasizes rapid responses for coding, summarization, analysis, and agentic tasks, and exposes configurable “thinking levels” via API to trade speed for deeper reasoning. Today, Gemini 3 Flash positions itself as a high-throughput, production-ready model, serving as the default in the Gemini app and Google Search’s AI Mode, optimized for scalable, interactive AI applications.
Anthropic
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's mid-tier large language model, released February 17, 2026, designed to balance performance, cost, and versatility for professional and developer use. It supports text and vision-based tasks with advanced reasoning, agentic capabilities, and Adaptive Thinking — a mode where the model dynamically scales its internal reasoning depth. A beta context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K standard) enables processing of entire codebases or document collections in a single request. Parameters are undisclosed.Optimized for coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, and knowledge work, Sonnet 4.6 delivers a full generational upgrade over Sonnet 4.5 and approaches Opus 4.5-level performance across many benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. It is the default model on Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and is available via API and major cloud platforms — making it well suited for production workloads requiring strong reasoning without flagship pricing.
Qwen
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct
Qwen3 VL 30B A3B Instruct is an open-weight multimodal large language model developed by Alibaba as part of the Qwen family, built for instruction-following tasks that unify text generation with visual and video understanding. Released around October 2025 under the Apache-2.0 license, it targets efficient, high-fidelity vision-language reasoning across very long contexts.The model accepts text and image inputs and produces text outputs, with strong performance in OCR, spatial reasoning, long-video understanding, and agentic or GUI-centric visual tasks. It uses a Mixture-of-Experts (A3B) design with ~31.1B total parameters and ~3B active per token, paired with Qwen3-VL’s unified multimodal stack (including Interleaved-MRoPE and DeepStack fusion) to process text, images, and video in a single architecture. OCR support expands to 32 languages, enhancing document workflows. With a native ~262K token context window (extendable further), it stands out today for its balance of scale, efficiency, long-context support, and open accessibility in multimodal systems.
Google
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash, released on June 17, 2025, is Google DeepMind’s production-ready, efficiency-focused model in the Gemini 2.5 family. It is multimodal, accepting text, images, video, and audio as inputs, with text as the primary output format. The model supports 1 million input tokens and up to 65K output tokens, enabling it to process very large contexts such as books, long video transcripts, or extensive datasets. Its training knowledge extends to January 2025.Designed as a price-performance leader, Gemini 2.5 Flash balances speed and reasoning power, making it suitable for everyday enterprise and developer use cases without the higher latency and cost of Pro models. It supports advanced workflows like function calling, code execution, search grounding, URL context ingestion, and structured outputs. While efficient and scalable, output length is still limited compared to its input capacity, and multimodal outputs (e.g. image or audio generation) remain restricted to specialized or preview variants.

Other OpenAI GPT Mini models

Other versions in the same family as GPT-5 Mini.

Deploy GPT-5 Mini with an API

GPT-5 Mini runs as a hosted REST endpoint through Roboflow Workflows. Pick a task, then hand the prompt to your coding agent or copy the code. Deploying the workflow into a free Roboflow workspace replaces the your-workspace and YOUR_API_KEY placeholders with your own.

Connect your agent to Roboflow (once)

Add the Roboflow MCP server

claude mcp add --transport http roboflow https://mcp.roboflow.com/mcp

Run /mcp and authorize Roboflow in your browser when the OAuth flow opens.

Start a new Claude Code session so the MCP loads, then paste the prompt below (it works the same in any agent).

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

Integrate the Roboflow "GPT-5 Mini" workflow into my app.

- Endpoint: POST https://serverless.roboflow.com/<your-workspace>/workflows/gpt-5-mini-captioning
- Auth: send my Roboflow API key as `api_key` in the request body, read from the ROBOFLOW_API_KEY env var (never hardcode).
- Body: { "api_key": ..., "inputs": { `image`: { type: "url" | "base64", value } } }.
- Billing: this workflow needs no provider API key — inference runs on my Roboflow credits. A BYO provider key can be added to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor later.

With the Roboflow MCP connected, call `workflows_get` on "gpt-5-mini-captioning" to read the exact input schema (the source of truth), then `workflows_run` on a sample image to confirm the output shape before writing code (the MCP is authenticated, so this needs no key). Without the MCP, use the contract above.

Before running the app, set up these keys so it does not error at runtime:
- `ROBOFLOW_API_KEY` (sent as `api_key`) from https://app.roboflow.com/settings/api
Create a .gitignore'd .env with these variables, using placeholder values for any I haven't given you. Then pause and tell me directly, in your reply: the full path to the .env file, exactly which keys I need to paste in, and the link to get each one. Wait for me to confirm I've added them before you run anything. Do not run the app until I confirm.

Then add the integration to my codebase: match my project's language, framework, and conventions; read every key from environment variables (never hardcode); add basic error handling; and include a small runnable example. If you can't tell what language my project uses, ask me.
Installpip install inference-sdk

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
# 1. Import the library
from inference_sdk import InferenceHTTPClient

# 2. Connect to your workflow
client = InferenceHTTPClient(
  api_url="https://serverless.roboflow.com",
  api_key="YOUR_API_KEY"
)

# 3. Run your workflow on an image
result = client.run_workflow(
  workspace_name="your-workspace",
  workflow_id="gpt-5-mini-captioning",
  images={
    "image": "YOUR_IMAGE.jpg"  # Path to your image file
  },
  use_cache=True  # cache workflow definition for 15 minutes
)

# 4. Get your results
print(result)

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

// Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
const response = await fetch('https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gpt-5-mini-captioning', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY',
    inputs: {
      "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
    }
  })
});

const result = await response.json();
console.log(result);

Deploy this workflow to your Roboflow workspace to use it.

# Inference runs on your Roboflow credits — no provider API key needed. To bill your own provider account instead, add an api_key to the model step in the Roboflow workflow editor.
curl --location 'https://serverless.roboflow.com/your-workspace/workflows/gpt-5-mini-captioning' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "inputs": {
    "image": {"type": "url", "value": "IMAGE_URL"}
  }
}'

GPT-5 Mini License

Proprietary

GPT-5 Mini is proprietary: the weights are not distributed, and the GPT-5 Mini license is the vendor's commercial terms of service that you accept when you call the API.

Commercial use
Permitted under the vendor terms, typically metered per token or per request, with the vendor usage policy applying to your inputs and outputs.
Modification
Not available. GPT-5 Mini weights are closed, so you can configure prompts and use vendor-hosted fine-tuning where it is offered, but you cannot modify the model itself.
Redistribution
Not permitted. You cannot self-host or resell the model; you build on the hosted API instead.

Vendor terms govern data retention, whether your inputs can be trained on, rate limits, and regional availability, and they can change with notice. Review them if you handle regulated or customer data.

Do I need a commercial license for GPT-5 Mini?

Proprietary terms are set by the vendor rather than negotiated per project, and no open-source obligation attaches to your code. If you would rather deploy a model whose commercial license is included in your plan — on Roboflow Managed Cloud or a Self-Hosted Inference Server — Roboflow's licensing page lists the supported alternatives to GPT-5 Mini.

Do not hesitate to reach out with questions for your commercial project — our team will help you start solving business problems on the first call. See Roboflow commercial licensing for the models included in each plan.

Talk to sales

This model is proprietary. The author retains all rights, and use of the model is governed by their specific terms of service or license agreement.

Commercial use depends on the terms set by the model author. Most proprietary commercial models require a paid subscription, API key, or per-call billing. Check the provider’s pricing and terms-of-service for details.

License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.

Frequently Asked Questions About GPT-5 Mini Vision

Yes. GPT-5 Mini accepts image input, and on Roboflow's previous vision benchmark it passed 73.1% of visual understanding tasks (#15 of 77) and scored 76.9% on OCR. You can test it on your own image in the demo above.

GPT-5 Mini has not yet been evaluated on Roboflow's current Vision Evals. The results on this page are from the previous benchmark.

Yes. The demo on this page runs GPT-5 Mini in the free Roboflow Playground: upload an image and see results in seconds. A free account unlocks unlimited runs.