OpenAI is cutting prices for individual large customers to pull them away from Anthropic, and it is working. Rippling, which sells payroll and HR software, now sends 52% of its coding work to OpenAI, up from 16% in May, while Anthropic's share fell from 57% to 18%. Replit, which makes a tool for building apps, made OpenAI its default after being offered more than 30% off a contract worth over $100 million a year. Anthropic had declined to extend Replit's earlier discount unless Replit committed to spend more.
The two companies are asking for different things
Anthropic asked its customer for a bigger promise before it would lower the price. OpenAI lowered the price first and asked for the volume afterward. A customer who is deciding where to send millions of requests will usually prefer the second offer.
Part of OpenAI's discount is real cost coming down. It cut the prices of its Sol and Luna models in half in September, and we covered how both companies were already lowering prices. The rest of the discount is margin OpenAI is giving up to win market share. DataCamp, an online learning company, cut its AI costs by 80% to 90% after moving work over. A discount that deep cannot last forever, because it is partly paid for out of OpenAI's own profit.
Leaving is cheap, so the threat is believable
Rippling moved about 40 points of its coding work from one provider to another in five months. That speed is the real news. A company that wants to move a database from one cloud to another can spend months on it. A company that wants to send its coding requests to a different AI model mostly changes which model the request goes to.
When leaving costs that little, the buyer has bargaining power, and the seller knows it. In 2014, cloud providers fought with list prices and everyone gained. Here the sellers are fighting customer by customer, because the biggest customers are the ones who can move the most work at once. China adds to the pressure, since DeepSeek and Kimi offer models with similar performance for far less money, and any buyer can point to them.
What this means for a company far smaller than Rippling
Nobody will offer a small business 90% off. But the bank in this story shows what the middle of the market can get. Before, it paid $20 or more for each of 250 seats, at least $5,000 a month. Now it pays under $7 for each of 500 seats, under $3,500 a month, for twice the people. A finance director who signs the first renewal quote without a second one is likely paying for that bank's gap, and $6,500 a month is $78,000 a year.
Two habits keep that option open. The first is to ask a second provider for a quote before every renewal, even if you plan to stay, because the first provider is now likely to lower its price when it sees one. The second is to avoid building your tools around one model's quirks, so that switching stays a settings change and does not turn into a project.
The third is to keep contracts short. If prices behave the way they did in cloud computing, the number you agree to now will look high within a year, and a multi-year commitment at that number would cost you the savings you could otherwise get.