OpenAI Pricing in May 2026

OpenAI's API pricing is the central planning question for any AI-powered product. GPT-4o (the workhorse) costs $2.50/1M input tokens, $10/1M output tokens. GPT-4o-mini is dramatically cheaper at $0.15/1M input, $0.60/1M output. Embedding models (text-embedding-3-small) cost $0.02/1M tokens. Real-world AI products land at very different cost points: a chatbot doing 10K conversations/month with GPT-4o averaging 2K tokens/conversation runs $200-400/month; high-volume agentic products with chained reasoning hit $5K-50K/month easily. Output token costs dominate — long completions are 4x more expensive than long contexts.

The $2,500 startup credit through OpenAI for Startups is meaningful but burns faster than founders expect. At GPT-4o pricing, $2,500 buys roughly 250M input tokens or 25M output tokens — enough to support a few thousand active users for 3-6 months at moderate usage. The eligibility window is narrow (early-stage startups within first year of incorporation, accelerator-backed preferred). The practical strategy: use credits to test product hypotheses (does the AI feature actually drive engagement?) before committing to production scale. Pair OpenAI credits with Anthropic credits ($2K) and Google Gemini credits to extend total runway across providers. Critically, GPT-4o-mini handles 80% of LLM workloads at 1/16 the cost — most production builds default to GPT-4o-mini for routine tasks and reserve GPT-4o for reasoning-heavy paths. The credit goes much further with this two-tier approach.