OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Pro shipped this week to broad availability, and the headline feature — improved reasoning under load — is real but not the news. The news is that the price went up. Per-million input tokens moved from USD 15 to USD 20, a clean 33 percent increase, with output tokens following the same curve. This is the first major frontier-model release in two years where the price-per-capability ratio for a serious user got worse, not better.

The implication for any team that priced its 2026 architecture against an assumed downward cost curve is real. We argued in March that 'wait for prices to drop' was no longer a defensible strategy; this week makes that argument concrete.