OpenAI's price ladder for its flagship doubles at every rung — and the only tier with a published speed is the one you cannot buy

Five days after OpenAI published the first tokens-per-second figure in the history of its API — 750 output tokens per second for the Ultrafast preview of GPT-5.6 Sol — that tier still has no price. The tier that does have a price still has no speed. The two facts belong together, and the shape of OpenAI's price list makes the point sharper than either announcement does. OpenAI sells GPT-5.6 Sol at three priced service levels, and on its own pricing page each level is exactly double the one below it. Flex and Batch processing cost USD 2.50 per million input tokens and USD 15 per million output. Standard costs USD 5 and USD 30. Fast mode costs USD 10 and USD 60. The doubling also holds on the long-context rows, which apply to requests above the model's 272,000-token threshold: 5 and 22.50 for Flex, 10 and 45 for Standard, 20 and 90 for Fast. Eight numbers, four exact factors of two, no rounding and no exceptions. What the ladder does not carry is a single speed. Fast mode carries a 100% premium over Standard, and OpenAI has never published a tokens-per-second rate, a latency figure or a percentage to say what that premium delivers. Flex is documented only as offering "slower response times and occasional resource unavailability" — again with no number attached. A customer choosing between the rungs is choosing between prices that are precise to the cent and speeds that are not stated at all. Ultrafast inverts this exactly. It is the first service level OpenAI has attached a throughput figure to — "up to 750 output tokens per second", "up to 14× faster than Standard processing" — and it is the only one with no price, available in limited preview to a select group of customers. One baseline can be derived from those two figures, with a caveat that matters. If the 750 tokens per second and the 14× multiplier describe the same run, Standard processing generates roughly 54 output tokens per second. That would be the closest thing to a published baseline this model has. But both figures are ceilings marked "up to", and OpenAI does not state that they were measured on the same run, so 54 is an inference from the announcement rather than a number OpenAI has disclosed. What this does not prove: nothing here indicates what Ultrafast will cost when it is priced. The doubling across the three existing rungs describes the current list, not a commitment about the next one, and a preview price need not survive to general availability.