Web Search pricing for reasoning models

API
1

Web Search pricing for reasoning models here: Pricing | OpenAI API

Contradicts Web Search pricing for reasoning models here: https://openai.com/api/pricing/

Is it $25 / 1000 or $10 / 1000?

2

https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing provides both types of usage:

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https://openai.com/api/pricing/ is a page that is more like an “advertisement”, funneling you into particular models, with only the latter models’ case.

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What they obfuscate is that the AI model can persist in making repeated internal tool calls at that rate.

Then you have web search on Chat Completions, which is its own AI model name, always bills the web search cost per-use, and there is only one fee possible per call, without context tokens costing you in input.

3

Looks like it’s fixed now. When I first looked it was definitely contradictory.

4

Yeah they’ve changed that since my post @merefield @_j

$25 / 1000 is expensive. I’ve been charging it out at $10 / 1000 in my app. Thanks @OpenAI_Support - weird this has never been clarified. Even on X in Oct 2025, it was described as $10 / 1000 in the completions endpoint (or is that the specialised model for completions?). If so, it’s all very confusing.

5

I checked our usage.

We’re being charged $15 / 1000 for gpt-4.1-mini with Web Search and $10 / 1000 for gpt-5-mini / gpt-5.4-mini with Web Search, which is the opposite of what their pricing suggests

Can you confirm @OpenAI_Support ?

6

Hi @bertie1

To look into this further, our Support team will need to review account-specific details, which we can’t safely handle on the public Community Forum. Please reach out to OpenAI Support directly so the team can review the charges and investigate further.

I’ll go ahead and close this thread while keeping it visible for reference.

Thanks for understanding.

~ Smith