OpenAI

What is OpenAI

OpenAI is one of the best-known AI companies in the market, spanning consumer products, developer tooling, and enterprise AI workflows. Today it serves end users through ChatGPT and builders through APIs, agents, image tools, voice features, and coding products such as Codex.

Its history matters because it helps explain the platform’s reach. OpenAI was founded in 2015, launched its first GPT language model research in 2018, moved into mainstream commercial awareness with GPT-3 in 2020, and then became a mass-market product company after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Since then it has expanded from a chat assistant into a broader AI stack covering multimodal generation, reasoning models, enterprise controls, and production API use.

For many teams, the appeal is simple: one vendor can cover everyday chat, research, coding, multimodal generation, structured outputs, and production AI access inside the same ecosystem.

Core offerings

• ChatGPT for day-to-day work, writing, analysis, research, and file-based tasks.
• API access for custom apps, agents, backend workflows, and product integrations.
• Reasoning and non-reasoning model options for balancing cost, speed, and quality.
• Image generation, advanced voice, deep research, and coding workflows through Codex.
• Business controls including workspace administration, SSO, privacy controls, and analytics on paid plans.

Pricing

As of July 31, 2026, OpenAI's US-listed consumer prices include Free at US$0, Go at US$8 per month, Plus at US$20 per month, and two Pro options at US$100 and US$200 per month. The two Pro tiers include the same core advanced capabilities, while the US$100 tier provides five times the Plus usage allowance and the US$200 tier provides twenty times the Plus allowance. OpenAI does not offer annual billing for Go, Plus or Pro.

ChatGPT Business costs US$20 per user per month when billed annually or US$25 when billed monthly, with a two-user minimum. It adds a secure workspace, central administration, SAML SSO, MFA, company knowledge, connectors, analytics and spend controls, with no training on business data by default. Enterprise uses custom pricing and adds SCIM, role-based access, customer-managed encryption, regional data residency, custom retention, SLAs and priority support.

Flexible ChatGPT usage

Business users receive per-seat limits for advanced features and can optionally use pooled credits after those limits. Enterprise and Edu use a contract-level shared credit pool. The current Business and Enterprise/Edu rate card charges approximately 10 credits per GPT-5.6 Sol message and 50 credits per GPT-5.6 Sol Pro message; agent mode costs 30 credits per message, deep research 50 credits per task, image generation 5 credits per image and voice 5 credits per minute. OpenAI notes that limits and temporary restrictions can still apply.

API pricing

Current promotional API prices per million short-context tokens are US$4 input, US$0.40 cached input, US$5 cache write and US$20 output for GPT-5.6 Sol; US$2, US$0.20, US$2.50 and US$12 for Terra; and US$0.20, US$0.02, US$0.25 and US$1.20 for Luna. OpenAI says the promotional pricing is available through at least 21 November 2026. Long-context requests use higher published rates: US$8/US$0.80/US$10/US$30 for Sol, US$4/US$0.40/US$5/US$18 for Terra, and US$0.40/US$0.04/US$0.50/US$1.80 for Luna.

Model footprint

All three GPT-5.6 tiers support text and image input, text output, a 1.05-million-token context window, up to 128,000 output tokens, the Responses and Chat Completions APIs, Batch, prompt caching, structured outputs, function calling and OpenAI's hosted tools. Sol is the flagship tier, Terra balances capability and cost, and Luna is optimised for cost-sensitive high-volume work.

Why select OpenAI

OpenAI is strong when you want one platform that feels polished for non-technical users and powerful for builders. The ecosystem around ChatGPT, API tooling, agent workflows, connectors, and broad third-party support is a practical advantage. It is also one of the easiest platforms to pilot quickly with stakeholders because most people already understand the product category.

Official sources: OpenAI business pricing, ChatGPT consumer plan prices, ChatGPT Pro tiers, ChatGPT flexible rate card, OpenAI API pricing, and GPT-5.6 Sol API documentation.

Current models

OpenAI publishes much richer live model metadata than most vendors. Where training data details are not public, the table says so explicitly rather than guessing.