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OpenAI has officially reached the 1 billion active users milestone, while also announcing a drastic price cut for its AI models. The cost of using certain versions of the GPT-5.6 service has dropped by 80%. However, even such an impressive user base has not yet allowed the company to turn a profit.
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Putting recent events into perspective, itβs safe to say that lowering costs remains one of the most effective ways to attract a new audience. OpenAI significantly reduced the cost of using two versions of its GPT-5.6 service, announcing this one day before revealing that it had surpassed the 1 billion active users milestone.
On July 30, OpenAI cut the price for the GPT-5.6 Luna version by 80%. From now on, processing 1 million input tokens costs $0.20, and 1 million output tokens costs $1.20, down from $1 and $6, respectively. The GPT-5.6 Terra variant received a more modest 20% discount, bringing prices down from $2.50 and $15 to $2 and $12. Meanwhile, the cost of Sol, which is the flagship and most powerful model in the OpenAI lineup, has remained unchanged.
In addition, OpenAI has launched a βFastβ mode for the Sol version. It speeds up request processing by up to 2.5 times compared to standard mode, but costs twice as much. The company assures users that this acceleration in no way compromises the systemβs intellectual capabilities.
The price reduction for the Luna and Terra plans has also affected the resource accounting system within the paid plans for Codex and ChatGPT Work: from now on, these algorithms consume fewer available credits. The total cost of subscriptions and the provided limits remain unchanged.
OpenAI representatives attribute the ability to lower rates to increased efficiency in the models themselves and the supporting service infrastructure. As part of a process supervised by experts, the GPT-5.6 Sol modification, operating in fully autonomous mode, rewrote and optimized the working cores of the graphics processing units (GPUs). This reduced the total cost of running the system by 20%. Additionally, experiments to improve speculative decoding increased token generation performance by more than 15%.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar noted that higher levels of intelligence drive broader adoption, broader adoption fuels investment growth, and increased investment drives further development of intelligent capabilities and efficiency.
The following day, Sarah Friar revealed that OpenAIβs systems now reach over 1 billion active users and serve more than 2 million businesses. The company did not specify whether these figures refer to a weekly or monthly period; however, given the previous statement about 900 million weekly users, it is likely that the figures refer to weekly metrics.
OpenAI also emphasizes that user engagement continues to grow over time. Six months after signing up, users send approximately 50% more messages daily and use ChatGPT to solve twice as many different types of tasks.
However, the influx of users has not yet led to financial success for the company. In 2025, OpenAI generated $13.07 billion in revenue, but its net loss reached $21 billion. At the same time, out of 900 million weekly users at that time, only about 50 million purchased a paid subscription. There were also reports that fixed AI pricing plans could become unprofitable if the service is used too intensively. Another price drop could trigger a further surge in popularity, but analysts warn that this would put even greater pressure on the businessβs profit margins, as OpenAI continues to pour massive amounts of money into computing power.