OpenAI slashes prices — and the whole market follows

OpenAI just cut the price of GPT-4.5 to 1/20th of what it was before. GPT-5 is cheaper still. The models are both faster and smarter than the old ones, so this is a real price drop, not a gimmick.

The market moves fast after this kind of headline. Anthropic, Google, and xAI all trimmed their rates within hours. Llama 4 dropped even harder. OpenAI's own pricing page now reads like a clearance sale — $0.0025 per million tokens for the cheapest model.

The real story is what this does to the people who actually use the models. Startups that were burning cash on API calls can now afford bigger models for the same budget. Agencies that sell AI work to clients suddenly have margin room. The old pricing structure — where big models cost 10x more than small ones — is gone. Price is converging toward the cost of electricity, not toward what the market will bear.

Why this matters for us: the gente who run side businesses and build things on top of AI just got their cost of goods sold cut — the margin on their hustle widens.