OpenAI API Pricing
The lab behind ChatGPT and the GPT family. Founded as a nonprofit in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman and others; restructured into a capped-profit LLC in 2019 and finally into a public-benefit corporation on October 28, 2025. Ships the largest commercial model lineup, the largest consumer AI product, and — after the April 2026 funding round — the highest-valued private AI company in history at ~$852B.
GPT-5.5
OpenAI's current flagship coding/reasoning model.
GPT-5.5 Pro
OpenAI's higher-accuracy Pro tier for harder questions.
GPT-5.4
Affordable GPT tier at half the GPT-5.5 standard price.
GPT-5.4 Pro
Pro tier for GPT-5.4.
GPT-5.4 mini
Smaller GPT-5.4 model for lower-latency coding, computer-use, and subagent workloads.
GPT-5.4 nano
Cheapest GPT-5.4-class model for classification, extraction, ranking, routing, and small subagents.
GPT-5.3-Codex
Specialized Codex model optimized for agentic coding tasks in Codex-like environments.
text-embedding-3-large LAUNCHED JAN 2024
Most capable OpenAI embedding model.
text-embedding-3-small LAUNCHED JAN 2024
Small OpenAI embedding model.
chat-latest LAUNCHED MAY 2026
Alias for the latest Instant model used in ChatGPT.
GPT-4 LAUNCHED MAR 2023
Original GPT-4 (gpt-4-0613, formerly gpt-4-0314).
GPT-4 Turbo LAUNCHED NOV 2023
Latest snapshot was gpt-4-turbo-2024-04-09.
GPT-4o LAUNCHED MAY 2024
Latest snapshot was gpt-4o-2024-05-13.
o4-mini LAUNCHED APR 2025
Successor to o3-mini — same headline rate but cheaper cache hit pricing ($0.275 vs $0.55).
GPT-3.5 Turbo LAUNCHED MAR 2023
Latest snapshot was gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 priced at $0.50/$1.50.
o3-mini LAUNCHED JAN 2025
First budget-tier reasoning model — 14x cheaper than original o1 ($1.10 vs $15 input) at competitive reasoning quality.
o1 LAUNCHED DEC 2024
First production o-series reasoning model (o1-2024-12-17 snapshot).
GPT-4.1 LAUNCHED APR 2025
OpenAI's GPT-4.1 series introduced 1M context windows to the GPT-4 family alongside another frontier price compression to $2/$8.
GPT-4.1 mini LAUNCHED APR 2025
Mid-tier GPT-4.1 — same 1M context as the base model, ~5x cheaper.
GPT-4o mini LAUNCHED JUL 2024
Set a new cheap-tier floor at OpenAI when it launched — $0.15/$0.60 was a 33x compression vs GPT-3.5 Turbo's original $5/$15-equivalent positioning and made OpenAI competitive with DeepSeek and Gem…
GPT-4 32K LAUNCHED MAR 2023
Extended-context GPT-4 variant.
GPT-4.5 preview LAUNCHED FEB 2025
Short-lived experimental flagship from OpenAI — only available for ~5 months.
GPT-4 Vision Preview LAUNCHED NOV 2023
First public OpenAI model with image input (alongside gpt-4-turbo's 128K context).
o1-mini LAUNCHED SEP 2024
Mini reasoning model launched alongside o1 — 5x cheaper than full o1 and surprisingly competitive on coding benchmarks.
| Model | Input /M | Output /M | Cached | Context | Max output | Vision | Tools | Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.5 FLAGSHIP | $5.00 | $30 | $0.5−90% | 1M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Frontier |
| GPT-5.5 Pro | $30 | $180 | — | 1.05M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Active |
| GPT-5.4 | $2.50 | $15 | $0.25−90% | 1.05M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Mid |
| GPT-5.4 Pro | $30 | $180 | — | 1.05M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Active |
| GPT-5.4 mini | $0.75 | $4.50 | $0.07−90% | 400K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Light |
| GPT-5.4 nano | $0.2 | $1.25 | $0.02−90% | 400K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Active |
| GPT-5.3-Codex | $1.75 | $14 | $0.17−90% | 400K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Active |
| text-embedding-3-large | $0.13 | Free | — | input-only | — | ✗ | ✓ | Active |
| text-embedding-3-small | $0.02 | Free | — | input-only | — | ✗ | ✓ | Active |
| chat-latest | $5.00 | $30 | $0.5−90% | 400K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Active |
| GPT-4 DEPRECATED | $30 | $60 | — | 8K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| GPT-4 Turbo DEPRECATED | $10 | $30 | — | 128K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| GPT-4o DEPRECATED | $5.00 | $15 | $2.50−50% | 128K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| o4-mini DEPRECATED | $1.10 | $4.40 | $0.28−75% | 200K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| GPT-3.5 Turbo DEPRECATED | $0.5 | $1.50 | — | 16K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| o3-mini DEPRECATED | $1.10 | $4.40 | $0.55−50% | 200K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| o1 DEPRECATED | $15 | $60 | $7.50−50% | 200K | — | ✗ | ✓ | Deprecated |
| GPT-4.1 LEGACY | $2.00 | $8.00 | $0.5−75% | 1M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Legacy |
| GPT-4.1 mini LEGACY | $0.4 | $1.60 | $0.1−75% | 1M | — | ✓ | ✓ | Legacy |
| GPT-4o mini LEGACY | $0.15 | $0.6 | $0.07−50% | 128K | — | ✓ | ✓ | Legacy |
| GPT-4 32K RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Jun 6, 2025 | → gpt-4o | ✗ | ✗ | Retired |
| GPT-4.5 preview RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Jul 14, 2025 | → gpt-4-1 | ✓ | ✗ | Retired |
| GPT-4 Vision Preview RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Dec 6, 2024 | → gpt-4o | ✓ | ✗ | Retired |
| o1-mini RETIRED | — | — | — | Retired Oct 27, 2025 | → o4-mini | ✗ | ✗ | Retired |
The last 12 months at OpenAI.
Major releases, deprecations, and corporate events. Sourced from official OpenAI announcements, the developers.openai.com deprecation queue, and recent press.
platform.openai.com — direct API, Playground, dashboard, billing, Batch + Flex + Priority tiers. Full pricing parity with everything you see on this page.
CLOUD · MICROSOFTModels in 28 Azure regions with EU + US Data Zones for in-region processing and storage. The default path for enterprises that need Microsoft contracts, BAAs, and Azure-native networking.
CONSUMER · WEBFree / Plus / Pro / Team / Enterprise tiers at chatgpt.com plus iOS, Android, macOS, Windows. End-user product; no API access. Plus from $20/mo, Pro from $200/mo.
DEV TOOLS · CLIOpen-source agentic coding terminal. Installs locally, pulls down whichever GPT-5-class model you authorise, runs inside your repo with shell access.
OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015 in San Francisco as a nonprofit research lab. The original founders included Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, and Trevor Blackwell, with an initial $1B funding pledge from a group of donors. The stated mission: ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
The corporate structure has gone through three eras. From 2015–2019 the lab ran as a pure 501(c)(3) nonprofit. In 2019 OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary (OpenAI LP, profit returns capped at 100×) to raise capital — Microsoft committed $1B that year and would eventually invest more than $13B for a 27% stake. In November 2023 the nonprofit board briefly removed and reinstated Sam Altman within five days, surfacing tension between the safety-focused board and the commercial entity. On October 28, 2025 the restructure completed: OpenAI converted into a public-benefit corporation with the OpenAI Foundation holding 26%, Microsoft holding 27%, and employees/investors holding 47%.
The technical contributions sit at the centre of the modern LLM era. The lab published the GPT-1 / GPT-2 / GPT-3 / GPT-4 / GPT-5 series, launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022 (fastest product to 100M users), shipped DALL-E, Whisper, Sora, and the o-series reasoning models. As of 2026 the lineup centres on GPT-5.5 + GPT-5.4 with the older o-series and GPT-4 family queued for full API retirement on Oct 23, 2026.
Funding scaled hard in 2025–2026. After a $157B valuation in October 2024 and a $300B round in early 2025, OpenAI closed a ~$122B Series F at a ~$852B valuation in April 2026, with Amazon committing $50B and SoftBank and Nvidia $30B each in February 2026. In parallel, the Stargate Project announced in January 2025 — a $500B AI infrastructure JV with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX — has added 5 new US sites and ~7 GW of planned capacity through 2026.
Compared to Anthropic: larger, broader model surface (image gen, audio, video, embeddings), bigger consumer brand via ChatGPT, but weaker stated safety commitments (no published RSP-equivalent) and a longer history of leadership volatility. Compared to Google DeepMind: weaker integration with productivity suites and a smaller context window on the flagship.
Anthropic
Stronger on coding-agent benchmarks and zero-retention defaults. Smaller lineup, no native image gen, no consumer app at ChatGPT's scale.
CLOUD GIANT2M-token context window and native Workspace integration. Behind OpenAI on coding-agent benchmarks; ecosystem reach is the moat, not raw quality.
WILDCARDxAI
Memphis Colossus supercluster and X/Twitter integration. Smaller developer ecosystem and shorter pricing history; Grok is improving fast but starting from behind.
Meta
Llama 4 405B is the strongest open-weight option and is self-hostable on your own hardware. Trails frontier closed labs on coding and reasoning benchmarks by ~10pt.
DeepSeek
10–30× cheaper at frontier quality with off-peak discounts on top. China-based — geopolitical and data-residency considerations apply for some buyers.
Frequently asked.
Practical questions about OpenAI, the GPT lineup, and how to spend on it without surprises.
Q · 01 Which GPT model should I start with? +
$5/$30 per M with 90% off cached input. Step up to GPT-5.5 Pro only for the hardest reasoning / coding questions where the accuracy delta is worth paying 6× output. Step down to GPT-5.4 for cheaper production traffic, GPT-5.4 nano for classification at $0.20/$1.25, or GPT-5.3-Codex for agentic coding inside the terminal.Q · 02 How safe is OpenAI relative to Anthropic? +
Q · 03 Does OpenAI offer EU data residency? +
Q · 04 What's the data retention policy? +
Q · 05 When will GPT-6 launch? +
5.3, 5.4, 5.5 shipped on roughly two-month intervals through 2026. A 6.0 major bump is unlikely before late 2026 / early 2027 based on this rhythm — though OpenAI compresses dot-versions much faster than majors.