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In a bid to more aggressively compete with rival AI companies like Google, OpenAI is launching Flex processing<\/a>, an API option that provides lower AI model usage prices in exchange for slower response times and \u201coccasional resource unavailability.\u201d<\/p>\n Flex processing, which is available in beta for OpenAI\u2019s recently released o3 and o4-mini<\/a> reasoning models, is aimed at lower-priority and \u201cnon-production\u201d tasks such as model evaluations, data enrichment, and asynchronous workloads, OpenAI says.<\/p>\n It reduces API costs by exactly half. For o3, Flex processing is $5\/M input tokens (~750,000 words) and $20\/M output tokens versus the standard $10\/M input tokens and $40\/M output tokens. For o4-mini, Flex brings the price down to $0.55\/M input tokens and $2.20\/M output tokens from $1.10\/M input tokens and $4.40\/M output tokens.<\/p>\n The launch of Flex processing comes as the price of frontier AI continues to climb<\/a>, and as rivals release cheaper, more efficient budget-oriented models. On Thursday, Google rolled out Gemini 2.5 Flash<\/a>, a reasoning model that matches or bests DeepSeek\u2019s R1<\/a> in terms of performance at a lower input token cost.<\/p>\n In an email to customers<\/a> announcing the launch of Flex pricing, OpenAI also indicated that developers in tiers 1-3 of its usage tiers hierarchy will have to complete the newly introduced ID verification process<\/a> to access o3. (Tiers are determined by the amount of money spent on OpenAI services.) O3\u2019s \u2014 and other models\u2019 \u2014reasoning summaries and streaming API support are also gated behind verification.<\/p>\n OpenAI previously said ID verification is intended to stop bad actors from violating its usage policies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n