[puppystench]

For API usage, GPT-5.5 is 2x the price of GPT-5.4, ~4x the price of GPT-5.1, and ~10x the price of Kimi-2.6.

Unfortunately I think the lesson they took from Anthropic is that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents, and they'll happily pay any amount for even small benefits.

[kingstnap]

I feel like devs generally spend someone else's money on tokens. Either their employers or OpenAIs when they use a codex subscription.

If I put on my schizo hat. Something they might be doing is increasing the losses on their monthly codex subscriptions, to show that the API has a higher margin than before (the codex account massively in the negative, but the API account now having huge margins).

I've never seen an OpenAI investor pitch deck. But my guess is that API margins is one of the big ones they try to sell people on since Sama talks about it on Twitter.

I would be interested in hearing the insider stuff. Like if this model is genuinely like twice as expensive to serve or something.

[vineyardmike]

You can't build a business on per-seat subscriptions when you advertise making workers obsolete. API pricing with sustainable margins are the only way forward if you genuinely think you're going to cause (or accelerate) reduction in clients' headcount.

Additionally, the value generated by the best models with high-thinking and lots of context window is way higher than the cheap and tiny models, so you need to provide a "gateway drug" that lets people experience the best you offer.

[CryptoBanker]

> You can't build a business on per-seat subscriptions when you advertise making workers obsolete.

On the other hand I would argue that most workers' salaries are more like subscriptions than API type pricing (which would be more like an hourly contractor)

[ewrs]

Yeah and the increase in operating expenses is going to make managers start asking hard questions - this is good. It means eventually there will be budgets put in place - this will force OAI and Anthropic to innovate harder. Then we will see how things pan out. Ultimately a firm is not going to pay rent to these firms if the benefits dont exceed the costs.

[dist-epoch]

> Ultimately a firm is not going to pay rent to these firms if the benefits dont exceed the costs.

This is also true for the humans. They will need to provide more benefits than the coding agents cost.

[eiksjs]

Humans are needed to use agents and these agents are not showing to be fully autonomous and require constant human review. In fact all you are getting is a splurge of stuff, people not thinking deeper anymore and the creation of more bottle necks and exacerbating the ones that already exist in an org.

You sound like elon with the fsd will be here next year. Many cars have the self driving feature - most drivers don’t use it. Oh why is that I wonder.

[mrwaffle]

Meaning that you believe they're not trying their "hardest" to innovate? They must be slacking then.

[girvo]

Budgets are already happening

[mitjam]

The difference between sub and api price makes it hard to create competitive solutions on the app level.

[irthomasthomas]

This was something I worried about after openai started building apps as well as models. Now all of the labs make no secret of the fact that they are going after the whole software industry. Its going to be hard to maintain functioning fair markets unless governments step in.

[w10-1]

Price increases now aim to demonstrate market power for eventual IPO.

If they can show that people will pay a lot for somewhat better performance, it raises the value of any performance lead they can maintain.

If they demonstrate that and high switching costs, their franchise is worth scary amounts of money.

[JohnLocke4]

Sometimes I wonder if innovation in the AI space has stalled and recent progress is just a product of increased compute. Competence is increasing exponentially[1] but I guess it doesn't rule it out completely. I would postulate that a radical architecture shift is needed for the singularity though

[1]https://arxiv.org/html/2503.14499v1 *Source is from March 2025 so make of it what you will.

[nomel]

> that devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents

An alternative perspective is, devs highly value coding agents, and are willing to pay more because they're so useful. In other words, the market value of this limited resource is being adjusted to be closer to reality.

[killingtime74]

It's not limited though there are alternative providers even now, much less when the price goes up. Chinese providers, European ones, local models.

[nomel]

> It's not limited though

Inference is not free, so all providers have a financial limit, and all providers have limited GPU/memory, so there's a physical material limit.

I suggest looking at the profits of these companies (while they scramble to stay competitive).

[scotty79]

We are constantly getting smaller and faster models that are close in performance to state of the art from few months prior. And that's due to architectural inventions. I'm sure it takes some time for these inventions to proliferate to frontier and that some might not be applicable there but we are definitely going faster than just due to compute increase.

It will get faster, but there are no singularities in the real world. Except possibly black holes, but we can't even be sure of that.

[pxc]

Maybe that's true. But I think part of the issue is that for a lot of things developers want to do with them now— certainly for most of the things I want to do with them— they're either barely good enough, or not consistently good enough. And the value difference across that quality threshold is immense, even if the quality difference itself isn't.

[Mars008]

> devs get really reliant and even addicted on coding agents

That's more about managers who hope AI will gradually replace stubborn and lazy devs. That will shift the balance to business ideas and connections out of technical side and investments.

Anyway, before singularity there going to be a huge change.

[pzo]

On top of that I noticed just right now after updating macos dekstop codex app, I got again by default set speed to 'fast' ('about 1.5x faster with increased plan usage'). They really want you to burn more tokens.

[nubg]

wow wait so it wasn't just me leaving it on from an old session?

sounds like criminal fraud to me tbh

[liamwire]

Dark pattern is the term you're (incorrectly) describing.

[0xbadcafebee]

A fool and his money are soon parted

[oh_no]

what's the source on that?

[puppystench]

In the announcement webpage:

>For API developers, gpt-5.5 will soon be available in the Responses and Chat Completions APIs at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with a 1M context window.

[oh_no]

oops, thanks. i had just been looking at their api docs