Not a complaint about pricing. A real question I could not answer until I went looking.
The intuition is that a better model needs fewer attempts, so a job should get cheaper. My bill kept going the other way, and the price per token had gone down, not up.
The answer turned out to be in the docs. Reasoning models produce a block of internal work before they answer, and OpenAI's guide says it plainly: those tokens are "not visible via the API" but are "billed as output tokens". Anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of them. Anthropic bills the same way.
