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 18, 2026, OpenAI’s Business plan is listed at US$20 per user per month when billed annually, or US$25 per user per month when billed monthly. Enterprise pricing is custom. OpenAI also uses flexible credit-based pricing for some advanced features and higher-end model usage in Business and Enterprise environments.
Model footprint
OpenAI’s public Business pricing page currently shows multiple GPT-5-family options, reasoning variants, legacy models, and o-series reasoning models. The exact menu changes over time, so the most useful way to assess OpenAI is not a fixed model count but the fact that it offers several quality/cost tiers inside one stack.
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 pricing, Flexible pricing overview.
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.
| Model | Context / output | Knowledge / training | Pricing / token use | Speed / notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
GPT-5.6 Solgpt-5.6-sol | 1.05M context 128K max output | Knowledge cutoff: 16 Feb 2026 Training data: not publicly disclosed | US$5 input / US$0.50 cached / US$30 output per 1M tokens | Frontier model for complex professional work and coding; full tool support |
GPT-5.6 Terragpt-5.6-terra | 1.05M context 128K max output | Knowledge cutoff: 16 Feb 2026 Training data: not publicly disclosed | US$2.50 input / US$0.25 cached / US$15 output per 1M tokens | Balance of intelligence and cost; lower price than Sol |
GPT-5.6 Lunagpt-5.6-luna | 1.05M context 128K max output | Knowledge cutoff: 16 Feb 2026 Training data: not publicly disclosed | US$1 input / US$0.10 cached / US$6 output per 1M tokens | Lowest-cost GPT-5.6 tier for high-volume traffic |
GPT-Realtimegpt-realtime | 32K context 4,096 max output | Knowledge cutoff: 1 Oct 2023 Training data: not publicly disclosed | Text: US$4 input / US$0.40 cached / US$16 output per 1M tokens Audio: US$32 input / US$0.40 cached / US$64 output per 1M tokens | Realtime text and audio I/O over WebRTC, WebSocket, or SIP |
| GPT Image 2 | Image generation / edit model | Knowledge cutoff: not published on the public model page Training data: not publicly disclosed | Usage billed on image-generation metrics rather than plain text-token pricing | OpenAI’s current state-of-the-art image generation model |