I was thinking the same. How can it be than other providers can offer third-party open source models with roughly the similar quality like this, Kimi K2.6 or GLM 5.1 for 10 times less the price? How can it be that GPT 5.5 is suddenly twice the price as GPT 5.4 while being faster? I don't believe that it's a bigger, more expensive model to run, it's just they're starting to raise up the prices because they can and their product is good (which is honest as long as they're transparent with it). Honestly the movement about subscription costing the company 20 times more than we're paying is just a PR movement to justify the price hike.
I'm pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are overpricing their token billed API usage mainly as an incentive to commit to get their subscriptions instead.
Anthropic recently dropped all inclusive use from new enterprise subscriptions, your seat sub gets you a seat with no usage. All usage is then charged at API rates. It’s like a worst of both worlds!
What's the point then? Special conditions for data retention/non-training policies?
SSO Tax is a large part of it, controls around plug-in marketplace, enforcement of config, observeability of spend. But it’s all pretty weak really for $20 a month.
And Microsoft are going the same route to moving Copilot Cowork over to a utilisation based billing model which is very unusual for their per seat products (I’m actually not sure I can ever remember that happening).
The target audience for the APIs is third party apps which are not compatible with the subscriptions.
True. I missed that.