I just noticed something that I’d like others to be aware of too – and something I’ve definitely not happy about!
On the Pricing page, I just spotted that OpenAI has chosen to charge for every call to the file_search tool – but only from the Responses API. That’s $2.50 per 1000 calls. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it adds up. Think about the fact that with gpt-4o-mini as the model, we are paying $0.15 for 1m input tokens. Our typical input using about 20-40k tokens. That’s about $5 per 1000 question/answers. But this new charge adds $2.50 to that (since we always need to consult the RAG content).
That’s a sneaky way of increasing the effective price (compared with Assistants) by 50%!
I had always appreciated that OpenAI kept its pricing models very simple. At least this should have been clearly stated in the announcement about the new Responses API.
