The Hidden Costs of GPT-4o: What OpenAI Doesn't Tell You
Dev.to AI
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Generative AI
GPT-4o is OpenAI's flagship model. The pricing page shows $2.50/1M input tokens. What it doesn't show is everything else you'll actually pay for. The Visible Cost Input: $2.50/1M tokens. Output: $10/1M tokens. Easy. # What you think you're paying input_cost = ( 1_000_000 / 1_000_000 ) * 2.50 # $2.50 output_cost = ( 500_000 / 1_000_000 ) * 10.00 # $5.00 # Total: $7.50 The Hidden Costs 1. System prompts are input tokens too Most production apps have 500-2000 token system prompts. On every single request.