OpenAI repeatedly keeps hurting user workflows by altering the model generations family for each new version in unpredictable ways. As such, it is not a sane ecosystem to develop in.
I said neither of these two statements or claims. The fact is that OpenAI's model family and release is not standardized. This means that if I have applications that are using the high, mid, and low tier models, e.g. at v5.6, it's not straightforward for me to update to a new version, e.g. v6 or v6.1 of these models because there isn't immediately a 1:1 mapping at the time of release of the version. Competitors to OpenAI don't have this problem, so I will bother with them.
Also for what it's worth your point turned out to be very true with yesterday's Image 2.6 release, where I was all happy to switch to it because the pricing was the same, only to later realize that prices would increase ~3x because my use case was using the "low" setting before, and the 2.6's low is ~3x the price of 2.5's low.