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

OpenAI's US-listed consumer prices include Free at US$0, Go at US$8 per month, Plus at US$20 per month, Pro 5X at US$100 per month and Pro 20X at US$200 per month. The two Pro tiers include the same core advanced capabilities, with five times and twenty times the Plus usage allowance respectively. Since 10 September 2026, new Pro 20X sign-ups and upgrades have been temporarily paused; existing subscriptions continue, and certain former subscribers may qualify for a one-time return. Pro 5X remains available. OpenAI does not offer annual billing for Go, Plus or Pro.

ChatGPT Business now offers Standard seats at US$20 per user per month when billed annually or US$25 monthly, and Premium seats at US$100 annually or US$125 monthly. Premium provides five times the Standard usage allowance and removes the five-hour agent-session limit. Business 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.

ChatGPT is now also available in Microsoft Word through the official Microsoft add-in. It can draft from notes, summarise documents, revise selected text, and adjust headings and formatting from a sidebar. Word is available across ChatGPT plans, uses the plan's normal token limits, and draws from the shared premium-feature allowance on plans that include one.

API pricing

GPT-6.1 Sol is OpenAI's latest leading API model. It is listed at US$2 per million input tokens, US$0.10 per million cached input tokens, US$2.50 per million cache-write tokens and US$10 per million output tokens. Requests above 272,000 input tokens cost twice the standard input and cache rates and 1.5 times the standard output rate. OpenAI also offers an optional ultrafast service tier for GPT-6.1 Sol at six times the standard token rates, with US and EU data-residency support. GPT-6 Astra remains available at US$10 input, US$1 cached input, US$12.50 cache write and US$50 output per million tokens.

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

GPT-6.1 Sol now leads the current catalogue, with GPT-6 Astra and the GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna tiers still available for different cost and performance needs. GPT-6.1 Sol supports a 1.05-million-token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. For image generation, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst and Flare are current options; the older GPT-Realtime model is deprecated in favour of current realtime models such as GPT-Realtime-2.1.

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 and current Pro 20X availability, ChatGPT flexible rate card, ChatGPT release notes, OpenAI API pricing, OpenAI model catalogue and deprecations, GPT-6.1 Sol documentation, GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst documentation, and GPT-6 Astra 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.