What We Could Not Confirm, and Why That Matters

There are entries on this site that say, plainly, "not published." Two models with no price, no context window, no rate limit — just a name and an honest admission that nothing checkable exists for them yet. There's a temptation to read a gap like that as a failure of research, something to apologize for or quietly hide. This site treats it as the opposite: the clearest evidence a reader has that everything else on the page was actually checked.

Why "not published" is a claim, not a shrug

It would be easy to treat "not published" as the lazy default — the thing you write when you didn't look hard enough to find an answer. That's exactly backwards, and it's exactly the mistake this site's own research made three times before correcting course. Writing "not published" honestly requires having actually checked the places a fact would plausibly live and coming back empty, not just failing to stumble across it. A model's own dedicated reference page, the general pricing page, the rate-limits guide — checking all of the relevant surfaces, and naming which ones were checked, is what turns "I don't see it" into a defensible "it isn't published."

The two models that carry this label most visibly

Two "Cyber"-named models appear in the raw list of model identifiers on OpenAI's own pricing page source, with no corresponding price anywhere in the rendered table, and their own dedicated reference pages return nothing when fetched. Every field this site would otherwise report for a model — window, output ceiling, cutoff, rate limits, price — is genuinely absent for these two, not defaulted to zero and not inherited from a sibling model's numbers. They're excluded from every calculator on this site for exactly that reason: a number this site can't verify isn't a number this site will guess at just to fill a blank cell.

Why guessing would be worse than the gap

Imagine the alternative: a calculator that, faced with an unpriced model, quietly substituted a nearby sibling's rate rather than refusing to offer it as an option. The output would look complete. It would also be confidently wrong, and wrong in a way a reader would have no way to detect, because nothing on the page would signal that the number was invented rather than sourced. A visible gap is honest. An invisible substitution is a lie dressed up as data.

The corrections that taught this site the opposite failure mode

It's worth being equally honest about the other direction, because this site has made that mistake too: over-using "not published" for a figure that actually was published, just not on the one page checked. Per-model rate limits were reported unpublished after checking only a general guide that defers to account settings, when each model's own reference page carried the real table. The long-context repricing rule was reported unpublished after checking only the pricing page, where the detail sits in an easy-to-miss rendered element, when the model's own page states it in a plain sentence. Both of these were corrected once discovered, and the correction matters as much as the original gap did — a false "not published" quietly removes a real, useful figure from every calculator that could have used it.

The discipline this creates

Every fact entry on this site now records which specific pages were actually opened, not just a final verdict. That's a small, unglamorous piece of bookkeeping, and it's the entire mechanism that makes the difference between an honest gap and a lazy one auditable rather than a matter of trust. A reader who wants to check whether "not published" is well-founded can see exactly what was checked and decide for themselves whether that's sufficient.

Why this matters more here than on a lot of sites

A site organized around computed answers — prices, break-evens, budget projections — lives or dies on whether its inputs are real. A single invented number, even a plausible-looking one, corrupts every downstream calculation that touches it, silently, with no error message telling the reader something's wrong. Treating "not published" as a real, checkable, sourced answer — as legitimate an outcome as a number — is what keeps that corruption from happening quietly. It's a narrower promise than "here's everything you need to know," and it's the right amount of confidence to have about facts a vendor genuinely hasn't published yet.

What to do if you find a gap that's actually since been filled

Vendor documentation changes. A model that's genuinely unpublished today may not be in a month, and this site's own weekly re-verification process exists specifically to catch that kind of change rather than letting a "not published" label go stale into a false one. If you've found a published figure this site still lists as unconfirmed, that's worth reporting — closing an honest gap with a real number is exactly the kind of correction this site's own process is built to make.

Why "unpublished" is not the same claim as "doesn't exist"

It's worth being precise about what this label does and doesn't assert, because the distinction matters for how a reader should act on it. "Not published" says nothing about whether a model, a feature, or a mechanic exists internally at OpenAI — only that no checked, citable source states it publicly. A reader planning around one of these gaps shouldn't read it as "this will never be priced" any more than they should read it as "this is definitely coming soon." It's a statement about the current state of public information, full stop, with no implied prediction about what happens next.

How this compares to simply omitting the entry

An alternative approach would be to leave unpriced models off this site entirely — no page, no mention, nothing for a reader to find if they go looking. That would technically avoid ever publishing an unconfirmed figure, but it would also strand exactly the reader who most needs an answer: someone who's encountered one of these model names somewhere and is trying to find out what it actually costs. A page that states plainly "here's what we checked, and here's what we found: nothing" serves that reader far better than silence does, even though the silence would look, superficially, like the more cautious choice.

The standard this sets for every other claim on the site

Once a site is willing to publish "we don't know, and here's exactly what we checked," it raises the bar for everything else it does claim to know — a positive figure sitting next to an honest gap reads as more credible than the same figure would on a site that never admits a limit to what it's confirmed. That's not an accident of presentation; it's the actual mechanism by which admitting uncertainty in the right places makes the certainty elsewhere more trustworthy, not less.