🔍 Read the full analysis: OpenAI And Anthropic Want Your AI Subscription—Read The Terms First on ThorstenMeyerAI.com
Get hardware and tech essentials delivered free with Prime
- Fast, free delivery on millions of items
- Prime Video, Amazon Music and more included
- Member-only deals all year
TL;DR
OpenAI and Anthropic have cut prices on several AI models, and OpenAI is reportedly offering discounts to attract enterprise customers from Anthropic. Some customers report lower costs or shifting workloads, but headline savings are not the same as list-price cuts. Buyers also need to check seat minimums, usage allowances and credit expiry rules.
OpenAI and Anthropic have cut prices on several AI models in recent months, and OpenAI is reportedly offering discounts to win business from Anthropic, according to an October 24 report by The Information. The price shifts may reduce costs for companies buying AI, but subscription limits, seat requirements and credit rules are changing too, making headline prices an incomplete guide to what customers will pay or receive.
Vendor pricing pages reviewed by ThorstenMeyerAI.com on October 26 show OpenAI’s Sol model line moving from $5 input and $30 output per million tokens in June to $2 and $10 for GPT-6.1 Sol in September. Its smaller Luna model moved from $1 and $6 to 10 cents and 50 cents per million tokens. These are prices for successive models, not necessarily reductions for an unchanged model.
Anthropic also lowered prices across newer releases. Its Opus line went from $5 input and $25 output per million tokens for Opus 5 in July to $4 and $20 for Opus 5.5, while the company said Opus 5.5 costs 40% less on typical workloads. Anthropic’s workload savings figures are company estimates, not independent measurements. It also cut the cost of cached input for some models, which can affect how much repeated context costs in agentic tasks.
The Information reported that OpenAI is using discounts to compete for large customers. Among the deals described in reporting based on the article, OpenAI reportedly offered Replit a discount of more than 30% on a contract worth over $100 million a year. DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said he expected his company’s total AI costs to fall 80% to 90% under an OpenAI offer. That figure describes expected savings against DataCamp’s existing setup; it is not a 90% reduction from OpenAI’s list price.
Infographic 01 · The price slide
Four months, a fraction of the price.
What a million output tokens cost on each vendor’s price list, from the June previews to today. Bars show the price; shorter is cheaper.
OpenAI · output price per 1M tokens
List prices, standard tier
Anthropic · output price per 1M tokens
List prices, standard tier
Same scale in both panels. Fable 5.1 kept its $50 output price and cut cache reads instead.
The quieter cut: cache reads
matters most for agents
Cache-read price per 1M tokens, same scale in all three.
Woolf estimates cached tokens make up 96–99% of token spend in agentic coding. Anthropic says Opus 5.5 costs 40% less than Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 about 25% (up to about 45%) less than Fable 5 on typical workloads; those are vendor claims. Most rows compare a successor model with its predecessor. Anthropic’s newer tokenizer produces about 30% more tokens for the same text, so per-token prices are not directly comparable across vendors.
Sources: OpenAI API pricing (26 Oct 2026); OpenAI announcements (26 Jun–29 Sep 2026); Anthropic API pricing (26 Oct 2026); Anthropic announcements (30 Jun–22 Sep 2026); Vercel AI Gateway index (Oct 2026); Max Woolf (25 Oct 2026).
Powered by Thorsten Meyer AI
Price Cuts Meet Contract Fine Print
Lower token prices and negotiated discounts could change the economics of building software and other services with AI. A company using models at high volume may see meaningful savings, but the final bill depends on its workload, the models it chooses, the use of cached inputs and the terms of its contract. List prices alone do not establish total cost.
Reported customer shifts also suggest that price and model performance are influencing which providers companies use. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad said OpenAI’s share of the coding work at his company rose from 16% in May to 52%, while Anthropic’s share fell from 57% to 18%. That is one company’s account, not a measure of the market as a whole, and the source material does not provide an independent breakdown of how the change affected its costs or output.
For individual subscribers, the practical issue is different but related: a monthly fee may stay the same while included usage changes. The source reports that OpenAI reduced the usage included with new $200 Pro subscriptions, and that Anthropic added capped, expiring API credits to its Max and Team plans. Customers comparing plans should check both price and the limits attached to it.
Products Worth Considering
LG UltraGear 45GX900A-B 45-Inch Curved OLED Gaming Monitor
LG 34GX90SA-W 34-inch Ultragear WQHD OLED Curved Gaming Monitor
LG UltraGear 27G640A-B 27-Inch QHD IPS Gaming Monitor, 300Hz, 1ms, G-SYNC Compatible, FreeSync Premium, DisplayHDR 400
As an affiliate, we earn on qualifying purchases.
How the Price Changes Accumulated
The reductions followed a run of model launches and pricing changes between June and September 2026. OpenAI cut Luna pricing in July and lowered Sol pricing for a limited period in August before introducing lower prices for GPT-6 Sol and Luna in September. Anthropic launched Sonnet 5 at introductory pricing in June, then made that pricing permanent in August. It released Opus 5.5 in September at lower listed rates than Opus 5.
Max Woolf, a data scientist who tracks language-model pricing, published a timeline of the changes on October 25. ThorstenMeyerAI.com said it checked the listed prices against vendor announcements and pricing pages retrieved October 26. The sequence includes both new models replacing older ones and price changes to models already offered, so the comparisons do not all describe the same product becoming cheaper.
That distinction matters when judging value. OpenAI said GPT-6.1 Sol offered “near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price,” while Anthropic has made its own claims about cost reductions on typical workloads. Those claims do not establish that a successor will perform equally well on every customer’s tasks. Testing the models on a company’s own work is needed to compare performance and cost in practice.
“OpenAI’s share of coding work rose from 16% in May to 52%, while Anthropic’s share fell from 57% to 18%.”
— Parker Conrad, Rippling CEO, as reported by The Information
What Customer Savings Actually Mean
The available reporting does not provide the full terms of the customer contracts or enough detail to independently verify the projected savings. In particular, DataCamp’s 80% to 90% figure is an expected reduction in total costs against its existing setup, while the exact workloads, usage volumes and comparison period are not specified in the supplied material.
It is also unclear how long the reported discounts last, whether they apply to particular models or usage levels, and what conditions customers must meet. Replit’s relationship with OpenAI was described differently across accounts: Masad called OpenAI its preferred partner while saying the company remained model agnostic, and a person familiar with the partnership told TechCrunch it was still in place.
Plan details also vary. The source reports a 20-seat minimum for Anthropic Enterprise, which could put that tier out of reach for many small advisory firms, and says OpenAI reduced usage included in new $200 Pro subscriptions. The supplied information does not detail all affected usage limits, effective dates or exceptions. Customers should verify current terms directly before comparing plans or renewing.
Check Limits Before Renewing
Companies considering a switch or renewal will need to compare the full contract: model rates, committed spend, discounts, usage caps, credit expiry and required seat counts. They can also test more than one provider on representative tasks, since lower prices do not by themselves show that a model is a suitable replacement. The reported customer moves make vendor competition relevant, but do not establish what another organization will save.
For subscribers, the next practical step is to review the plan’s current allowance rather than relying on its monthly fee or older terms. The reported pricing changes span several months, and provider plans can change independently of model list prices. No additional pricing announcement or deadline is specified in the source material, so further changes and the duration of individual enterprise offers remain unconfirmed.
Key Questions
Did OpenAI cut prices by 90%?
Not according to the figures described here. DataCamp’s CEO said his company expected its total AI costs to fall 80% to 90% under an OpenAI offer. That is not the same as a 90% discount on OpenAI’s list prices.
How much did OpenAI’s Sol and Luna prices change?
For the models compared in the source, Sol moved from $5 input and $30 output per million tokens in June to $2 and $10 for GPT-6.1 Sol in September. Luna moved from $1 and $6 to 10 cents and 50 cents. The comparison includes different model versions.
Are Anthropic’s plans changing beyond model prices?
The source reports that Anthropic added capped, expiring API credits to its Max and Team plans and set a 20-seat minimum for Enterprise. Customers should check the current plan terms for the details that apply to them.
What should a company compare before switching providers?
Compare expected total cost, not only the per-token list price. That means reviewing actual usage, model performance on the company’s tasks, discounts, usage allowances, seat minimums and credit rules.
Source: ThorstenMeyerAI.com
