Why GPT-5.5 costs more — and when it's worth it
GPT-5.5 looks expensive — double GPT-5.4 per token — but the sticker price isn't the whole story. It uses 19–34% fewer tokens on longer prompts, so the real-world gap is smaller than it appears. The premium buys what a business actually cares about: fewer mistakes and more work done per request on complex, multi-step tasks.
Worth it for complex, high-stakes, multi-step work — long documents, agent workflows, anything where a wrong answer is costly. Not worth it for routine, high-volume tasks, where GPT-5.4 or GPT-5 do the job for far less.
The takeaway: match the model to the job, not to the headline. Most businesses run a mix — a capable model for the hard work, a cheaper one for the volume.