Krux
March 19, 2026
OpenAI Cuts Token Costs to $0.20 With GPT-5.4 Nano
Published: March 19, 2026 at 12:39 AM
Updated: March 19, 2026 at 12:39 AM
100-word summary
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano today, letting bigger models offload grunt work to cheaper, faster siblings. Mini runs twice as fast as the prior version and costs $0.75 per million input tokens. Nano drops that to $0.20, the lowest OpenAI price yet. The pitch: your main model handles strategy while mini clones handle parallel tasks like scanning large files or interpreting screenshots. Mini gets a 400k context window and works in ChatGPT and Codex. Nano stays API-only. Free ChatGPT users get mini as their new default thinking mode. Translation: building AI assistants that don't bleed money just got easier.
What happened
OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano today, letting bigger models offload grunt work to cheaper, faster siblings. Mini runs twice as fast as the prior version and costs $0.75 per million input tokens. Nano drops that to $0.20, the lowest OpenAI price yet. The pitch: your main model handles strategy while mini clones handle parallel tasks like scanning large files or interpreting screenshots. Mini gets a 400k context window and works in ChatGPT and Codex. Nano stays API-only. Free ChatGPT users get mini as their new default thinking mode.
Why it matters
Translation: building AI assistants that don't bleed money just got easier.