OpenAI's GPT-5 Turbo is out — 60% cheaper, half the latency

OpenAI shipped GPT-5 Turbo this week. It's the successor to GPT-4 Turbo and lands at about 60% lower cost per token and half the response latency. The pricing is roughly $1.50 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens — which makes it one of the more affordable options for any shop that's been paying for GPT-4 since the early days.

The model is built on OpenAI's latest architecture and is the new default for the Chat Completions API. That means everything that points at gpt-4-turbo can switch over without code changes, which is what most teams will do first. It also supports up to 128K context windows, so it handles long documents and codebases without the chunking gymnastics.

Pricing is the headline, but the real story is the latency drop. OpenAI is using a new routing system to send requests to the right servers, which cuts wall-clock time in half for many workloads. For anything that streams a response — a chat UI, an agent, a live transcription — the difference is noticeable. For batch processing, the cost savings compound.

Why this matters for us: the models we rely on are finally getting cheaper without getting worse, which means the tools we build can run more often and cost less — no vendor lock-in, no surprise bills.