AI Got Half Price Tuesday. Your Software Bill Didn't.

OpenAI put out two new models Tuesday, called Sol and Luna. I'm not going to walk you through the benchmark scores, because you don't need them. The number that matters is the price. Both models came out at half the cost of the versions they replaced, and OpenAI confirmed to VentureBeat that it's permanent pricing, not a launch promo. Anthropic had put out a cheaper version of its own big model about ninety minutes earlier that same morning.

You're not buying those models directly. Almost nobody outside of software companies is. But you're probably paying for four or five tools that are.

The chat widget on your website. The CRM add on that drafts your follow ups. The notetaker sitting in on your Zoom calls. The scheduling tool that texts people back at 9pm when you're home with your kids. All of that is running on top of somebody's API, and as of Tuesday the raw cost of running it went down by roughly half.

Nobody is going to email you about this

What usually happens when the underlying cost drops is that the software company keeps the difference. That's not shady, that's just how business works, and I'd probably do the same thing in their seat. Some of them will pass a little of it on because a competitor made them. Some will quietly move you onto a better model and keep charging you what they were charging, which is honestly the best version of this for you since your stuff just got more accurate for free.

The point is you won't find out which one your vendor did unless you ask. So ask.

Pull up your card statement and pick out every line item that's an AI tool, plus anything you bought in the last eighteen months mostly because it had AI features bolted on. For each one, send the vendor two questions. 1: which model are you running underneath, and when did you last update it? 2: my price is X, is that still where it lands after the September price drops? Twenty minutes of typing for the whole list.

You might get nothing. You might get a month free from somebody who doesn't want to lose you. Either way you now know whether the tool you're paying for is running on this year's technology or something from eighteen months ago, and that's worth knowing on its own.

The other half of this

There's a second group of business owners this matters to, and it's the people who already said no.

I've had a handful of owners around here price out something real, an AI setup to answer the phone after hours and push the actual emergencies to their cell, that kind of thing. Quote comes back at three or four hundred a month, they run the math, they pass. Completely reasonable call at the time.

Here's the thing though. A big chunk of what a vendor charges for that is what it costs them to run it, and that cost has now dropped twice in about three weeks. The quote that didn't work in the spring might work now. If you told somebody no on price this year, it costs you one email to ask them to re quote it.

A lot of what I actually end up doing in workshops isn't teaching prompts. It's sitting with an owner and going line by line through what they already pay for every month. More often than not we find two tools doing the same job, or something they're paying for that nobody on the team has opened since March. The AI part is usually the easy part. The subscription drawer is where the money is hiding.