Use Batch Work Only When the Deadline Fits

An overnight document-classification job and a live customer conversation have different timing needs. Choose the API workflow around the deadline.

For work that can wait, evaluate the Batch API using its current completion-window and pricing documentation. Submit a small synthetic batch first and record submission, completion and retrieval times. Decide what your process will do if some requests fail or the output is not ready when the next step starts.

Keep urgent work on a path designed for its response-time requirement. A lower unit price is not a saving if the result arrives after the business decision. Measure the complete workflow, including reconciliation and retries, before moving a recurring job to batch processing.

OpenAI documentation.