I was thinking the same. How can it be than other providers can offer third-party open source models with roughly the similar quality like this, Kimi K2.6 or GLM 5.1 for 10 times less the price? How can it be that GPT 5.5 is suddenly twice the price as GPT 5.4 while being faster? I don't believe that it's a bigger, more expensive model to run, it's just they're starting to raise up the prices because they can and their product is good (which is honest as long as they're transparent with it). Honestly the movement about subscription costing the company 20 times more than we're paying is just a PR movement to justify the price hike.
I'm pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are overpricing their token billed API usage mainly as an incentive to commit to get their subscriptions instead.