$5 consumed in 4 noob requests or less

If you’re using LangChain or LangGraph, use GPT-5.4 Mini or GPT-4o Mini for agent flows and process work. Mini models are made for speed, structured tasks, and contextual workflows. Set temperature to 0 for more logical and stable outputs.

Use GPT-5 or GPT-5.5 only for harder reasoning tasks depending on your budget. There’s no point using a $30/1M output token model just to summarize a PDF or extract text when GPT-5.4 Mini can do it for around $1/1M output tokens.

Rotate models based on the task:

• cheap/fast models for orchestration and utility work

• expensive frontier models only for deep thinking

Also don’t stress too much about costs initially. Try Azure AI Foundry and OpenRouter. Open-source models are getting insanely good and many of them cost almost nothing to run.