OpenAI Ships GPT-5.5 to ChatGPT and API at $5 / $30 Per Million Tokens
OpenAI's smartest model is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise. API priced at $5 input / $30 output per million tokens, with a 1M context window and a GPT-5.5-pro tier at $30 / $180.
OpenAI on April 23 released GPT-5.5, which it is calling its "smartest model yet," to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers — and to API developers in the Responses and Chat Completions endpoints.
The Launch
GPT-5.5 is priced at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with a 1 million-token context window. A higher-accuracy variant, GPT-5.5-pro, is rolling out for $30 input / $180 output per 1M. OpenAI says the model matches GPT-5.4's per-token latency in real-world serving, despite being larger and more capable. Consumer rollout covers Plus/Pro/Business/Enterprise on ChatGPT; 5.5-pro is Pro/Business/Enterprise-only.
Why It's a Signal
On OpenAI's own benchmarks, GPT-5.5 outscores Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 on coding, research, and tool-use tasks — the three capabilities enterprise buyers are underwriting right now. Pricing is noticeably above 5.4, but OpenAI argues the model is also more token-efficient per task. The bigger signal: just weeks after GPT-5.4, OpenAI is again shortening its release cadence while raising the price ceiling.
One underappreciated detail: OpenAI's release cadence has compressed from quarters to weeks. GPT-5 shipped mid-2025, GPT-5.4 in late Q1 2026, and 5.5 arrives roughly six weeks later. That cadence, combined with Thursday's $30-per-million-output-token headline, signals OpenAI no longer treats aggressive discounting as the moat. The 5.5-pro tier at $180 per 1M output tokens now sits next to Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro Ultra at nearly identical price ceilings — a convergence that didn't exist six months ago. Frontier pricing has effectively formed a cartel-adjacent floor, and the competition has shifted from "who's cheapest" to "who ships the next capability jump first."
OpenAIBlockAI News' View
If you're building AI-agent products, re-run your cost models against 5.5's output pricing today — and benchmark 5.5-pro on your hardest long-horizon tasks before re-quoting enterprise deals. The price/quality frontier just moved again.
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