So i crunched some numbers today.

Im trying to make a chat gpt driven app, and i looked at what would happen if i scaled up. Im currently using $.02 daily, which is a fair estimate. Now, running those numbers up,

Hundreds (e.g., 100 users): Daily cost: 100 users * $0.02/user = $2

Monthly cost: $2/day * 30 days = $60

Annual cost: $60/month * 12 months = $720

Thousands (e.g., 1,000 users):

Daily cost: 1,000 users * $0.02/user = $20

Monthly cost: $20/day * 30 days = $600

Annual cost: $600/month * 12 months = $7,200

Tens of Thousands (e.g., 10,000 users):

Daily cost: 10,000 users * $0.02/user = $200

Monthly cost: $200/day * 30 days = $6,000

Annual cost: $6,000/month * 12 months = $72,000

How the hell can any startup afford this?? These prices feel exorbitant. And trust me, im trying to minmax my token usage as much as i can here, but it hurts when you get charged for tokens sent, returned, in chat history and system prompt.

Idk, whats yall’s opinion? Has anyone made a gpt app that didnt break the bank?

Edit: just woke up, ouch my karma

Edit 2: seeing alot of comments asking my business plan, im not trying to out myself here but generally speaking i expect the service to be something like the following:

-users would pay a one time fee to access the app for a period of time, typically a few months. Chats are also rate limited to 15/3 hours

There was one pretty helpful comment out there pointing out that simply charging users the equivalent of $.04 a day would solve alot of issues, and honestly I agree so shoutout to that guy wherever he is.

Apparently 70k is considered normal for VC funding, which is nuts to me. I ran a firebase app for a year with about 100 active users and spent $.12 on bandwidth, so the jump is jarring.

Im still standing by my statement. Lower level startups will get gate kept by this pricing, leaving only the giants to monopolize it. Our only hope is for PALM to have better pricing or wizardLM to catch up.

Hello, I’m having a hard time figuring out how many tokens I would need if I’m building a simple web app that uses a chatbot through the OpenAI API. There are a lot of models available, and I’m not really sure which one to use. The app I’m building is a school project, so I don’t expect many people to use it.

Essentially, the idea is that users would ask the app specific questions, and if they tell the chat to “save” the response, it would call a function to store it.
Also, if I’m testing the responses, would that use up tokens? Or is there a free way to test responses from the API?

Looks like we're about to add another item to Masayoshi Son's list of SoftBank funding failures. OpenAI just released the next version of their flagship LLM, and the pricing is absolutely mind-boggling.

GPT-4.5 vs GPT-4o:

• Performance: Barely any meaningful improvement

• Price: 15x more expensive than GPT-4o

• Benchmark position: Still behind DeepSeek R1 and qwq32B

But wait, it gets worse. The new o1-Pro API costs a staggering $600 per million tokens - that's 300x the price of DeepSeek R1, which is already confirmed to be a 671B parameter model.

What exactly is Sam Altman thinking? Two years have passed since the original GPT-4 release, and what do we have to show for it?

All GPT-4.5 feels like is just a bigger, slightly smarter version of the same 2023 model architecture - certainly nothing that justifies a 15x price hike. We're supposed to be witnessing next-gen model improvements continuing the race to AGI, not just throwing more parameters at the same approach and jacking up prices.

After the original GPT-4 team left OpenAI, it seems they've accomplished little in actually improving the core model. Meanwhile:

• Google is making serious progress with Gemini 2.0 Flash

• DeepSeek is delivering better performance at a fraction of the cost

• Claude continues to excel in many areas

Is OpenAI's strategy just "throw more computing at the problem and see what happens"? What's next? Ban DeepSeek? Raise $600B? Build nuclear plants to power even bigger models?

Don't be shocked when o3/GPT-5 costs $10k per API call and still lags behind Claude 4 in most benchmarks. Yes, OpenAI leads in some coding benchmarks, but many of us are using Claude for agent coding anyway.

TL;DR: OpenAI's new models cost 15-300x more than competitors with minimal performance improvements. The company that once led the AI revolution now seems to be burning investor money while competitors innovate more efficiently.

Hello,

I currently have a pro subscription, which I don't use very much.
This month (just 1 week left for the next billing cycle), I have used around 24,300 words/32,320 tokens. With my current rate, I may end up using (let's be generous) 60,000 tokens.

This will come around, to 3.65 dollars (using 0.06 USD/1k token again being generous).

So, I'm thinking of cancelling my pro subscription and start using the API. Also, to note, I'm a developer, so I can really make it work without any issues.

I want to know if I am missing anything in my calculations, and is this worth it?
Please consider adding any information on things like sending previous questions & answers as payload to current question etc.

Thank you

I've been a satisfied subscriber to the ChatGPT Premium service for a few months now. Recently, I've been given access to the GPT-4 model API, which has prompted me to contemplate a potential change in the way I use this service.

Considering the possibility of exclusively using the API, I'm contemplating designing a user-friendly web application similar to ChatGPT to optimize my utilization. This decision is primarily motivated by the potential cost benefits. However, I'm unsure if the API is indeed more economical than the Premium service.

Would anyone care to share their insights or experiences on this matter? I'm particularly interested in understanding the comparative cost-effectiveness of these two options.

Competitors can't generate enough data to create a distilled version. Too costly.

This is a response to DeepSeek, which used the OpenAI API to generate a large quantity of high quality training data. That won't be happening again with GPT 4.5

Have a nice day. Competition continues to heat up, no signs of slowing down.

Here is a quick Summary:

I initially expected it to be very expensive, but they have roughly stayed the same.
Input tokens seem to be a little cheaper for GPT5 vs GPT 4.1
This would make it a lot cheaper to give the model a lot of info and context.

Also glad they updated their model page. It looks soo much more cleaner and intuitive.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5

Hello! This is my first time here and I have a problem understanding how the API works. I'm trying to build an LLM + QA application and I want to use the GPT API. My problem is how does the pricing works? I created the secret key and if use the key in the code along with the line

model: "(any model I choose)",

and start doing some prompts it will start being asked to pay on the account? Shouldn't I pay in advance to have access to use the model?
How does all this things work?

I know it's not a straightforward comparison but I'm curious to know how much value those 25 messages every 3 hours from ChatGPT-4 (which comes out to a maximum of 6,075 messages per month) offer compared to what GPT-4 would provide for $20.

If anyone has any insight or thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them!

Using Opus and GPT-4 I easily rack up over $50 simply by including significant portions of my codebase. What about you guys?

I have a sub to chatgpt plus but have also just received the email invitation to the gpt4 api . I’m struggling to work out which is cheaper to use. Does anyone have both and can give a comparison?

So there is a 20$ "base price" for using chatgpt-4, and then additional prices (?) depending on token amounts?

The 32k context length models are much higher priced per prompt/sampled tokens than the 128k context length models? The training data seems to be both of Dec 2023.

I also wrote to [email protected], the automatic answer told me "This email address does not offer support. To get support, please visit our Help Center and start a chat with our support bot."

The "Help Center bot" was not very helpful for getting answers.

Thanks for any clarification!

Anybody have a general cost per hour they're seeing with the 4o and 4o mini realtime audio API since the price decrease and improved caching?

I know that before, people were saying they were hitting $60+ per hour.

New GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini realtime snapshots at lower cost

We’re releasing gpt-4o-realtime-preview-2024-12-17 as part of the Realtime API beta with improved voice quality, more reliable input (especially for dictated numbers), and reduced costs. Due to our efficiency improvements, we’re dropping the audio token price by 60% to $40/1M input tokens and $80/1M output tokens. Cached audio input costs are reduced by 87.5% to $2.50/1M input tokens.

We’re also bringing GPT-4o mini to the Realtime API beta as gpt-4o-mini-realtime-preview-2024-12-17. GPT-4o mini is our most cost-efficient small model and brings the same rich voice experiences to the Realtime API as GPT-4o. GPT-4o mini audio price is $10/1M input tokens and $20/1M output tokens. Text tokens are priced at $0.60/1M input tokens and $2.40/1M output tokens. Cached audio and text both cost $0.30/1M tokens.

These snapshots are available in the Realtime API⁠(opens in a new window) and also in the Chat Completions API⁠(opens in a new window) as gpt-4o-audio-preview-2024-12-17 and gpt-4o-mini-audio-preview-2024-12-17.New GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini realtime snapshots at lower costWe’re releasing gpt-4o-realtime-preview-2024-12-17
as part of the Realtime API beta with improved voice quality, more
reliable input (especially for dictated numbers), and reduced costs. Due
to our efficiency improvements, we’re dropping the audio token price by
60% to $40/1M input tokens and $80/1M output tokens. Cached audio input
costs are reduced by 87.5% to $2.50/1M input tokens.

Hey there!

So I am blind, and there was this new addon that was released for the screen reader that I use called AI Image Describer. This was made by a user over on the Audiogames Forums, and it was incredible. I have been loving giving this thing a shot!

It allows me to use the GPT-Vision API to describe images, my entire screen, the current focused control on my screen reader, etc etc. So suffice to say, this tool is great.

I was even able to have it walk me through how to navigate around in a video game which was previously completely inaccessible to me, so that was a very emotional moment for me to experience.

The thing is, from what I understood, this API was priced at $0.01 per 1000 tokens. I see that on my pricing page, however, that I have already charged around $1.06 to my account for the month, and I am not sure how on earth I managed to rack up costs that high?

I was wondering if maybe the GPT Vision API costs more than the base GPT-4 Turbo model itself? That is the only way this would make sense to me, because in order for me to have reached this amount of usage, I would have had to uploaded around 1,000 different screenshots at this point, because the tokenizer on OpenAI's site claims that the average input/output text I am getting is around 119 Tokens in total, so I can't imagine I came anywhere close to the amount required to generate that much cost unless I am only facroting the cost for tokens, and not the Vision API costs?

Would love some insight on this! I am also going to email OpenAI to see if they can walk me through this for sure as well, and hopefully I can get this all figured out. In the meantime though, I wanted to se what you all here thought. <3

I'm not exaclty going to cry over a dollar spent using such an awesome tool, but if I want to incorporate this into my daily routine while gaming on games that aren't natively accessible with my screen reader, I would definitely have to wait until those costs come way down.

I was looking to buy the open air API for my simple NLP classification problem.

Given the current price for chat gpt 4o 2.5$/1 M input tokens I have calculated that it would cost me less than 2$ a month to use the API?

My output is 3 class classification so the output cost is nearly next to nothing.

I feel like something is off..

Does anybody have any real life experience using their API?