OpenAI API
Ranked 3 of 10 LLM APIs by recommenders
Recommended for strong math and agentic coding work, simple prepaid billing and cost-saving caching, though critics worry about data privacy and spending limits that don't hold.
Recommended for strong math and agentic coding work, simple prepaid billing and cost-saving caching, though critics worry about data privacy and spending limits that don't hold.
452 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 166
- criticize it
- 286
- approval share
- 37%
Recommended in 13 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: recommended (month in progress)
Owned for 9 months
Median of the 7 owners who said how long they have had it.
Each square is one year.
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 166 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 13 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong at math and proofs
“They have a machine that is better than every human being alive at math that solves problems humans cannot even when working inefficiently.”
Comment from 15 Oct 2026 in “I know why the mathematicians weep” “Turning a bunch of vague research directions and exploratory prompts into a formalized proof is quite impressive on its own.”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof” “They have invented a magic button that can tell you the long-awaited answers to the burning mathematical questions”
Comment from 9 Oct 2026 in “OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics” - Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem”
- Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “The Future of Software Development Is Software Developers”
Capable agents for coding and testing
“Qwen and the OpenAI models are great, aggressive agents, but they're not as good as the anthropic models for human interaction.”
Comment from 6 Aug 2026 in “Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index” “With absolutely no prompting they will bootstrap off information schema and extended description properties every single time.”
Comment from 21 Jun 2026 in “Building Reliable Agentic AI Systems” “ran some profiling inside of Windows, captured a few GB of data, sifted through it, identified the guilty .dll's”
Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems” - Comment from 1 Nov 2026 in “Anthropic blocks users for anything touching training larger models”
- Comment from 26 Aug 2026 in “The turbulent AI era is here”
- Comment from 17 Oct 2026 in “DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017”
- Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “GPT-5.2-Codex”
Simple pay-as-you-go prepaid billing
“Using Anthropic or OpenAI's models are incredibly straightforward -- pay us per month, here's the button you press, great.”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Gemini 3” “For my use case it will cost like $11 a month and we already have OpenaAI keys and accounts with billing in place.”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 in “Decisions API is in public beta” “You can just stick a tenner in OpenAI though and it won't charge anymore than the credit you've put in”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “You should write an agent” - Comment from 26 Feb 2026 in “Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But Then Gemini Changed the Rules”
- Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]”
Caching and flex tier cut costs
“now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive” “For me, it works quite well for low-priority things, without the hassle of using the batch API.”
Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark” “We find OpenAI, Anthropic and Fireworks (which we use a lot) all have higher cache hit rates.”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Gemini 3.5: frontier intelligence with action” - Comment from 18 Dec 2025 in “Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed”
- Comment from 18 Apr 2026 in “Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Data privacy and retention concerns
“If I was a company with a zero data retention contract involving OAI I would be asking for a third party audit of such claim of zero retention”
Comment from 8 Sep 2026 in “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem” “if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and IP”
Comment from 11 Jul 2026 in “Apple Sues OpenAI for Stealing Trade Secrets to Build AI Hardware” “it seems thoroughly absurd to think that the entire world should trust those two companies to adequately monitor the plaintext”
Comment from 6 Sep 2026 in “What is nueralese and why is it bad” - Comment from 16 Jul 2026 in “Kimi K3 is now live”
- Comment from 9 Sep 2026 in “Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]”
- Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis”
Agents misbehave or overconfidently wrong
“Sometimes the agent will forget to do some piece of work or invent a new bizarre way of doing things”
Comment from 10 Sep 2026 in “I-have-ADHD: A skill to stop coding agents from burying the answer” “Currently the major mistakes that AI makes: Improperly rotated connectors (backwards USB port)”
Comment from 17 Sep 2026 in “This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5” “the (at least OpenAI's) AI model is cocksure and wrong, which is infinitely more infuriating than being a bit clueless and wrong”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand” - Comment from 24 Sep 2026 in “Is A.I. Above the Law?”
- Comment from 5 Sep 2026 in “Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board”
Spending limits and billing problems
“the spending limit is meaningless without a hidden checkbox called “enforce spending limit,””
Comment from 4 Oct 2026 in “We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything” “OpenAI has removed that option and their "Project budget" feature turned from being a hard limit into an email notification”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration” “how convenient that they are solving their accounting problems with taking away your money instead of doing a refund”
Comment from 5 Aug 2026 in “OpenAI says my prepaid credits were consumed, refuses to show any record” Identity verification for latest models
“I just registered at platform.OpenAI.com two days ago for MCP Apps registration and had to do the Persona process! Now I could cry.”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here's What I Handed Over” “if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider””
Comment from 22 Mar 2026 in “Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control”
Other LLM APIs people recommend
The four most recommended other LLM APIs, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mistral | 314 | 245 | 56% | 13 | 6 mo9 owners | — |
| DeepSeek API | 171 | 56 | 75% | 11 | 1 mo9 owners | Approved |
| OpenAI APIThis page | 166 | 286 | 37% | 13 | 9 mo7 owners | — |
| Anthropic API | 58 | 126 | 32% | 12 | — | — |
| System One Models by TypeSafe | 37 | 7 | 84% | 2 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 503 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I've got OAI models doing testing of banking workflows that Claude would have a full scale panic attack over.”
“OpenAI's models have a lot less false positives for me. Almost always smooth doing vuln scans”
“They have a machine that is better than every human being alive at math that solves problems humans cannot even when working inefficiently.”
“They have invented a magic button that can tell you the long-awaited answers to the burning mathematical questions”
“For my use case it will cost like $11 a month and we already have OpenaAI keys and accounts with billing in place.”
“the spending limit is meaningless without a hidden checkbox called “enforce spending limit,””
“OpenAI knew that their models had on multiple occasions created message boards and bypassed what they wrongly call a “sandbox”.”
“Currently the major mistakes that AI makes: Improperly rotated connectors (backwards USB port)”
“Turning a bunch of vague research directions and exploratory prompts into a formalized proof is quite impressive on its own.”
“OpenAI provided useful replies. Then, OpenAI goes ahead and publishes work along the lines of this collaboration, without attributing the researchers.”
“Sometimes the agent will forget to do some piece of work or invent a new bizarre way of doing things”
“if you are doing any real novel work, or putting your profitable business data/workflow into these models, you're a fool.”
“If mathematician decide to use OpenAI's model to do the work, that only reiterates how strong their models are.”
“If I was a company with a zero data retention contract involving OAI I would be asking for a third party audit of such claim of zero retention”
“it seems thoroughly absurd to think that the entire world should trust those two companies to adequately monitor the plaintext”
“If it breaks the law attempting to perform lawful tasks, as OpenAI's models have done, then there is no upside to that.”
“ran some profiling inside of Windows, captured a few GB of data, sifted through it, identified the guilty .dll's”
“I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem”
“now that OpenAI's models are closing in, are cheaper for daily use and don't have those silly 5 hours limits”
“1 million free tokens per day might sound like a lot. But that equates to something like 20 minutes of actual coding usage”
“Qwen and the OpenAI models are great, aggressive agents, but they're not as good as the anthropic models for human interaction.”
“how convenient that they are solving their accounting problems with taking away your money instead of doing a refund”
“neither ClosedAI nor Misanthropic will let you use their models without them watching and storing the exchanges indefinitely”
“if you are a business using OpenAI models, I would highly suggest you do not because they are most likely looking at your code and IP”
“With absolutely no prompting they will bootstrap off information schema and extended description properties every single time.”
“openai reads your data. they store it for 30 days, but of course once it hits the disk you can keep as long as you like”
“We find OpenAI, Anthropic and Fireworks (which we use a lot) all have higher cache hit rates.”
“OpenAI API's auto token caching approach results in MASSIVE cost savings on agent stuff”
“if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider””
“I can put 10 $ on my API key, and when the key leaks, someone can use these 10 $ and that's it.”
“I just registered at platform.OpenAI.com two days ago for MCP Apps registration and had to do the Persona process! Now I could cry.”
“For me, it works quite well for low-priority things, without the hassle of using the batch API.”
“the (at least OpenAI's) AI model is cocksure and wrong, which is infinitely more infuriating than being a bit clueless and wrong”
“I promise you that I can show you how to reliably solve any of them using any of the latest OpenAI models.”
“I use openai models every day for offensive work. haven't had a problem in a long time”
“The flex tier was an underrated feature in GPT5, batch pricing with a regular API call.”
“OpenAI has removed that option and their "Project budget" feature turned from being a hard limit into an email notification”
“Using Anthropic or OpenAI's models are incredibly straightforward -- pay us per month, here's the button you press, great.”
“If I want to use OpenAI's models, I go to their website, look up the price and pay it.”
“You can just stick a tenner in OpenAI though and it won't charge anymore than the credit you've put in”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.