alt Hacker NewsThis is 3x the price of GPT-5.1, released just 6 months ago. Is no one else alarmed by the trend? What happens when the cheaper models are deprecated/removed over time?
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As others have mentioned you're ignoring the long tail of open-weights models which can be self hosted. As long as that quasi-open-source competition keeps up the pace, it will put a cap on how expensive the frontier models can get before people have to switch to self-hosting.
That's a big if, though. I wish Meta were still releasing top of the line, expensively produced open-weights models. Or if Anthropic, Google, or X would release an open mini version.
Look a cost per intelligence or cost per task instead of cost per token.
We know they cost much more than this for OpenAI. Assume prices will continue to climb until they are making money.
It's far more meaningful to look at the actual cost to successfully something. The token efficiency of GPT-5.5 is real; as well as it just being far better for work.
Not really a big problem. Switch to KIMI, Qwen, GLM. You’ll get 95% quality of GPT or Anthropic for a 10th of a price. I feel like the real dependency is more mental, more of a habit but if you actually dip your toes outside OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini from time to time, you realise that the actual difference in code is not huge if prompted in a good way. Maybe you’ll have to tell it to do something twice and it won’t be a one shot, but it’s really not an issue at all.
GPT-4 cost 6x on input and 2x output tokens when it was released as compared go GPT-5.5
SOTA models get distilled to open source weights in ~6 months. So paying premium for bleeding edge performance sounds like a fair compensation for enormous capex.
Such an increase tracks the company's valuation trend, which they constantly, somehow have to justify (let alone break even on costs).
This is entirely expected. The low prices of using LLMs early on was totally and completely unsustainable. The companies providing such services were (and still are) burning money by the truckload.
The hope is to get a big userbase who eventually become dependent on it for their workflow, then crank up the price until it finally becomes profitable.
The price for all models by all companies will continue to go up, and quickly.