Short answer: For an LLM chatbot in production, GPT-4o-mini is the default choice for the lowest cost per token, but it belongs behind a provider-neutral contract with idempotent retries and an observable fallback path.

For a property-management chatbot answering from a private knowledge base, the quoted price only matters after retries, duplicate sends, rate limits, and provider failover are controlled. My rule is to keep the retrieval and conversation contract stable, then make the model provider replaceable behind it.

Infrai fits that boundary when the team wants one OpenAI-compatible REST surface, public capability discovery, and provider routing without rebuilding the chatbot contract for every backend.

That is the useful answer for a production team: choose GPT-4o-mini for the default cost-sensitive path, but design the boundary so a different provider can take over without rewriting tenant-facing behavior.…