I think that they can get away with not exploring pricing as much because they’re trying to drive costs down instead and expand the market first. But I agree I’m surprised that prices aren’t being explored more.
Their new mini model is supposedly a lot smaller and cheaper than anything they’ve released before. If it compares to v3 which started this craze, then it’s clearly good enough to capture imagination and drive usage. People have posited that it’s cheap enough for per-click advertising to fund too. OpenAI claims that the lower cost model has doubled demand, which would be a good sign for supply-side growth.