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Monday, November 9, 2026Sources checked

Models & Research

Sam Altman almost scrapped token pricing. Here’s why he backed off.

By Amanda Caswell, The New Stack

Sam Altman almost scrapped token pricing. Here’s why he backed off.

Picture: The New Stack

OpenAI considered dropping token-based pricing for its next model, letting developers submit a prompt and receive a price for the work, before negative customer feedback convinced the company to back away from the idea, CEO Sam Altman says. The flat-fee pricing idea Speaking Thursday with Stripe President John Collison on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman recalls that OpenAI “almost made a very — what would’ve been a bad call” to stop pricing its next model in tokens altogether, moving instead to an arrangement where a developer hands over a prompt and OpenAI hands back a price. The billing would have worked “like AWS,” he explained, where you “just do something and we send you a bill” rather than metering the exchange token by token.

This report was first published by The New Stack. What you see here is a brief excerpt. The full text is theirs.

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