OpenAI shifts distribution, pricing

OpenAI is reshaping how it sells and bills its products as it pushes harder into big-company customers, with Amazon taking a larger role. (cnbc.com) In a Sunday memo viewed by CNBC, Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser told staff that Amazon Web Services had become a key enterprise channel and wrote that Microsoft had “limited” OpenAI’s ability to meet customers on Amazon Bedrock. Amazon announced in late February that it planned to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI as part of that partnership. (cnbc.com) Dresser told CNBC earlier in April that enterprise now makes up 40% of OpenAI’s revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026. CNBC also reported that OpenAI was valued at more than $850 billion in a late-March fundraising round, while Anthropic was valued at $380 billion a month earlier. (cnbc.com) The pricing shift is showing up most clearly in Codex, OpenAI’s coding product. On April 2, OpenAI changed Codex billing for new and existing Plus, Pro, and Business customers, plus new Enterprise customers, from per-message charges to token-based pricing tied to how much text a model reads and writes. (help.openai.com) OpenAI’s help page says existing Enterprise customers and some other plan types are still on a legacy rate card for now, with migration planned in the coming weeks. The new card lists separate rates for input, cached input, and output tokens, and says typical Codex usage runs about $100 to $200 per developer each month, with wide variation by model and workload. (help.openai.com) OpenAI is also folding Codex access deeper into ChatGPT subscriptions instead of treating it like a separate product. Its developer pricing page says Codex is included in ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Edu, and Enterprise plans, while API-key use in the command line interface, software development kit, or integrated development environment extension is billed separately by token. (developers.openai.com) The company’s consumer and workplace pricing pages now split those paths more clearly. ChatGPT Business is sold per user per month with “standard or usage-based Codex seats,” while Enterprise is sold through sales contracts and separate invoicing, and the application programming interface remains usage-priced outside ChatGPT plan billing. (chatgpt.com) (developers.openai.com) That leaves OpenAI trying to widen distribution at the same time it makes billing look more like cloud software. Amazon Web Services gives OpenAI access to companies that already buy models through Bedrock, while token-based pricing gives finance teams a meter they can compare with other software and cloud bills. (cnbc.com) (help.openai.com) Microsoft remains central to OpenAI after investing more than $13 billion since 2019, but the latest memo shows OpenAI trying to reduce its dependence on a single channel as enterprise spending becomes the main test of its revenue story. (cnbc.com)