OpenAI is switching off its entire image line by 1 December — and the cheapest model dies with it

OpenAI's deprecation page now schedules the end of every image model the company sells except one. gpt-image-1 goes dark on 23 October 2026; gpt-image-1.5, gpt-image-1-mini and chatgpt-image-latest all follow on 1 December. Every one of them names the same replacement: gpt-image-2. For most users that is a price cut. Priced per million image tokens, the 2025 original gpt-image-1 is the dearest model in the whole line at $10 in and $40 out. gpt-image-1.5 charges $8 and $32. The survivor, gpt-image-2, charges $8 and $30 — 25% less on output than the model it replaces, which is the opposite of what the industry has been doing this year. The exception is the one model built for people watching costs. gpt-image-1-mini charges $2.50 per million image tokens in and $8.00 out. It has no successor of its own: the migration table sends it to gpt-image-2 as well. That is 3.2 times more on input and 3.75 times more on output, for anyone who chose the mini precisely because it was cheap. The pattern is becoming familiar. Cheap tiers are announced as an entry point, then quietly folded into the flagship when the line is consolidated — and the bill for the migration lands on the users who were most price-sensitive to begin with. Batch pricing halves all of these figures, but it halves them for both the old model and the new one, so the ratio does not move.