It sounds like the free tier is more of a trial with 100k tokens total, not per month

And only 3 months to use said 100k tokens.

The 3 month window is the killer. free tiers are there to give time for developers to learn an API, or to prototype something nights/weekends.

Correction: it's $0.08 per additional 1K tokens. That is $8 for 100K tokens.

If I understand the pricing correctly, that seems prohibitive. The models go up to 2k tokens of input, so wouldn't that mean that it costs $.16 per output token?

I'm confused as well, what's a 'token' and how many do I need?

Some FAQ items:

What does 2M tokens equal in terms of number of documents/books/etc?

This is roughly equivalent to 3,000 pages of text. As a point of reference, Shakespeare’s entire collection is ~900,000 words or 1.2M tokens.

Will the API be general public access starting 10/1?

No, we will still be in limited private beta.

How are the number of tokens per each subscription tier calculated?

The number of tokens per tier includes both the prompt and completion tokens.

How are tokens differentiated across engines?

These token limits assume all tokens are generated by davinci. We will be sharing a reference legend for other engines soon.

What will fine-tuning cost? Is it offered as part of this pricing?

Fine-tuning is currently only available for the Scale pricing tier.

Like, this doesn't tell me how much project X or project Y will really cost.

I hope there will be resellers. There is room for a lot of markup in the small volume.

I think these volumes are relatively small. Bear in mind that this is tokens, not API calls. Depending on how much input text or output text there is a single call could easily be using 100s of tokens.

Resellers sounds like something that would be explicitly against the terms of service.

Anyone selling access to a GPT-3 based product will be a reseller, strictly speaking.

So, providing no value and simply making money off of less knowledgeable users?

Nah, I hope there won't be any resellers.

well, the value would be allowing other users to purchase smaller amounts.

Maybe I have some hobby app that still sometimes goes over the 100k free tier limit, I might be paying $10/month to get 50k extra but I'm not willing to pay $100 for 2M when I'm never going to use 90% of that.

There is no free tier. You get 100k token that you can use for free and you have 3 months to use them.