
The AI price split: why the middle market is disappearing
OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 pricing (about $5 input, $30 output per million tokens) and DeepSeek’s open-weight V4-Pro/Flash offerings have created a two-cluster AI market, widening the cost gap between a closed, vendor-managed product and cheaper, open infrastructure. The once-smooth price-performance curve now shows a thinning middle, forcing developers to route workloads across the high-end integrated stack and the lower-cost open-weight stack, and reshaping how AI agents and coding assistants are built and deployed.
