OpenAI considered dropping token-based pricing for its next model, letting developers submit a prompt and receive a price for the work, before negative customer feedback convinced the company to back away from the idea, CEO Sam Altman says.

Speaking Thursday with Stripe President John Collison on the Cheeky Pint podcast, Altman recalls that OpenAI “almost made a very — what would’ve been a bad call” to stop pricing its next model in tokens altogether, moving instead to an arrangement where a developer hands over a prompt and OpenAI hands back a price.

The billing would have worked “like AWS,” he explained, where you “just do something and we send you a bill” rather than metering the exchange token by token. Altman does not name the model in question or give a timeline for when the change was under consideration.

The idea ran into resistance when OpenAI tried to gauge how customers felt about receiving a price with no breakdown. “The customer response on that is so negative,” Altman recounts, with buyers telling the company, “’I need to know what I’m paying for somehow.’”

Developers already spend plenty of time tracking input and output tokens to keep costs down and estimate what they’ll spend as usage grows. Getting a price without knowing how it was calculated would only make that harder.

What makes the admission worth a second look is that, according to Altman, the people he consulted would rather pay more to keep that visibility.

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