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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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There was an article yesterday that if you sign up for the most expensive OpenAI plan and actually use it fully, OpenAI loses $14k a year on you.
This reminds me of the early Internet days. I ran an ISP. Like everyone else we offered "unlimited" service. But if everyone actually used unlimited we would have been bankrupted because it would tie up a phone line (channel of a pri) and modem on the portmaster. Regular users only used 1/10th of "unlimited".
I think that number is massively inflated. $1k loss is much more reasonable value
Where did you get $1k? Semianalysis's report is paywalled but seems thorough.
Rough estimation. Reasoning + answer is ~1k tokens. API price for Chat GPT 5.5 is $30 per 1mil of output tokens, $5 per mil, for new input tokens and $0.50 for cached tokens. They allow 3k reasoning prompts per week.
Quick math 12000prompts x1000tokens=12mil tokens per month which will be 12x30= $360 add all long context costs at and you can double or triple that cost.
If you consider non reasoning prompting cost can be scaled to infinity since as far I'm aware subscription offers unlimited access for that. But they have anti abuse clause in the agreement, so I doubt you'll get to anywhere close to $14k cost
It's their unlimited plan that loses them money. Where did you get 3,000/week? Their message cap is hidden and users complain they don't know how much of their "unlimited" is used up before being cut off.
They forgot to update polish translated help site. What a clusterfuck.
https://help.openai.com/pl-pl/articles/11909943-gpt-55-in-chatgpt
This paragraph doesn't exist in eng version
Right now it says Plus and Business plans are limited to 3000 messages per week for thinking, and that automatic switch to thinking doesn't count towards limit.
Thy updated yesterday apparently so who knows what was written a week ago... So I don't know, If I misread business for pro, or did they update policy again and again.
Edit: Correction eng exists but says
So they have some unspecified limit?
Isn't that basically every 'all you can eat' model though? 20% of people will fully max their usage, causing a loss, but the 80% of users will use far less than the purchase price, netting $$$ for the company. When that balance shifts, most places just put more limits to that 'all you can eat' or raise prices. Sure, I have unlimited internet, but it's difficult to symmetrically max out my 5gbit connection to get that full 'cost' each month.
As long as OpenAI has a health amount of money in the bank ($50 billion it seems), they have a long time to burn money, and then you just keep getting people to invest. Pretty sure that's been the model of every tech company for a long time. I think Uber took almost 15 years to be profitable, and had almost $50 billion invested. For a company that owns essentially zero cars, pretty wild.
I take your ISP didn't have a free tier that also lost money, though, unlike these companies with apparently infinite money to give away