Deprecation notice: Prompt Objects in the API will be shut down on November 30th, 2026

The costs will not skyrocket. There is some misunderstanding here: The prompts feature is simply a way for you to have provided the same input to the AI model, but stored on the OpenAI servers. You paid for the input data of a large instructions field in the model’s input cost regardless of whether it was added by use of a prompt’s “developer” message created in the platform site (no longer “playground” because prompts and the UI now is not fun), via the “instructions” field in the Responses API, or whether by self-managed chat turns with a “system” role message as guidance. The only thing this feature might have saved you is some in-flight network time - but OpenAI’s backend services, and even Responses over Chat Completions, add latency also. And models now have thinking a long time before you see any output as a latency feature. Calls to the API should not be originating from mobile devices, calling OpenAI directly, that you have to “redeploy”. That indicates that your client code has the API key. You just gave every user the password to make their own API calls, only needing to be captured over the network or reversed out of the app.