GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%

The competition is real in pricing. Thanks for the Chinese open models, US big players have to cut their inference pricing. We've done a bunch of evals between the models, and Kimi K3 was the first one that actually could compete or be even better than Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. All our developers use K3 as their programming model, and it now powers a big part of our systems instead of Opus and GPT. Surprisingly the new Sol pricing is quite similar to K3...

Now DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 is eating Gemini's lunch, and suddenly we saw a price cut (the "introductory price") for 3.7. DeepSeek is of same quality or sometimes better than Gemini for text, Google knows it and they have to compete. Too bad it's too little and too late, it's still 4-5x more expensive in our evals.

And these models are not going away, nor their prices going up because of competition in the inference providers and due to the fact that you can buy/rent the hardware and run them in your own premises.

After using Claude for a long time, I tested Sol 5.6 for the first time today. Love it, its an incredibly capable model and uses far fewer tokens/time thinking. Its what I imagine Fable would be if I haven't been downgraded on every conversation - even after completing the verification program. I think I may cancel my Claude subscription finally.

This sure looks like a race to the bottom to me, and I love it.

If Sol isn't the best model, it is up there...

You don't cut the price of the best model for no reason...

Where is the official source for this?

OpenAI's docs still show non-discounted pricing https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol

Luna saw a huge jump after the price cut and is one of the more competitive models at the new price on openrouter.

Maybe they want to see how much market they can grab with Sol?

This might help but there are already cheaper models with Sol's intelligence more or less, the most notable being Grok 4.6 at $6/m which makes it a tougher sell

Sol is really stable for me.

I have switched to Chagpt sub now after only using Claude for coding. You get more value for your money and feels like codex has reached Claude code performance in coding (the reason for using Claude) regular plus account allows you to have access to their most powerful model, image generation and asking questions is better because you can use sol but in instant mode and it feels smarter and faster. And finally codex usage limits are better than the Claude daily 5h limit. And codex feels faster although Claude code had more features

I used over a billion tokens per day of gpt-5.6 sol xhigh starting last Wednesday through Sunday before reaching my reset limit. The $200 pro plan is still the best deal.

If they can cut the price of Sol by 50% and the price of Luna by 80%, then the original price might have carried a massive operating margin. They might still be serving the models at a profit after these price cuts, but we will never know.

Since it's only discounted on the standard "OpenAI," non-ZDR route (old pricing on Azure), I'm guessing a lot of users won't see this benefit? Since a lot of users enable a global "ZDR-only" toggle on OR

This is the opening salvos of an all out token price war.

With models a commodity at this point there isn’t much leverage for the big labs to keep their pricing anywhere near where it’s at. And that’s at the worst possible time as they need to be dramatically raising prices to have a viable business model.

Expect pricing to rapidly fall towards the underlying cost of compute and as players get really desperate we’ll likely see inference at less than the cost of compute as the market starts to rationalize and squeeze out weaker players who’s only play left will be to be the cheapest option in town.

The AI bubble is just waiting for the first player to scream mercy and cut capex as they simply can’t afford to throw more cash on the burning pile. That will be the trigger that implodes this bubble.

Price wars did wonders for many businesses, like the bike sharing industry in China.

Overgrown datacenters or mounds of GPUs dumped into the harbour next ?

I like to see this. I still prefer Fable (marginally) but my last big task was 100% Codex using Sol max (re-sizing my AWS infrastructure using CDK) and it did a very good job. No complaints, I could use this model happily to do what I need to get done.

If this nudges Anthropic to give me more Fable usage, that's even better.

dang, to avoid confusion from the title perhaps this should be edited to: “OpenRouter temporarily cutting GPT-5.6 Sol pricing by 50%”

Hard to estimate what enabled the price cuts, Yet OpenAI is doing some magic work, especially recently.

Is this pricing change only for openrouter? I don't see official OpenAI info about this.

Does this mean less subscription credit usage as well?

Slightly unrelated: what's up with the "tps" value? Does GPT-5.6 Sol really deliver just 32 tokens/second?

At this point the models are “good enough” and whoever wins long term is gonna be whoever is the cheapest.

That’s why Chinese models are gaining traction and it’ll be the only way for OpenAI or Anthropic to keep up.

My bet is that OpenRouter began steering GPT-5.6-sol users towards flex tier, which is already 50% off.

So this isn’t really a price cut. As to why, lots of possible reasons. Perhaps an agreement with OpenAI to help them drive up more diverse traffic priorities.

I'm loving this race to the bottom.

Is this motivated by the value of the thinking traces gleaned from the traffic?

The title looks to be misleading, since this price cut is limited to OpenRouter. It does not apply for the native OpenAI price listed at https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol

I saw this for Luna and then looked at the uptime and it said 85%. My interpretation is that this is just a gimmick where they serve the OpenAI flex tier at the same discount OpenAI provides for flex and then fall back to azure

Has anyone had mixed experience running Ultra with and without /goal? I come back to it after 8 hours to find it got stuck navel gazing imagined and Byzantine errors.

No ZDR. No dice.

Even at these prices, switching from subsidized subscriptions to the API just isn't worth it. Not even close.

In my experience, "Sol" stands for "Stupid overengineering LLM". I’ve tried it at low/medium/high/xhigh effort levels and after a while I always end up to regretting my switch from Opus/Fable.

Reading the comments in this thread, i honestly dont get it. 5.6-sol has felt like a regression in capability. In fact, every model since 5.3-codex has been a regression from OpenAI. I just find 5.6-Sol over engineers problems, takes absolutely ages to solve basic problems....

At this point, I'm considering going back to cursor over codex due to the ability to get more control over what model I use since there is clearly a heap of user preference and having frontier providers constantly shift the goal post with "State of the Art" is complete non-sense.

These threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based. Yes, something may now be cheaper or more expensive or whatever, but there is no way to objectively measure quality (except for "trust me bro" benchmarks). So the discourse is people saying that for them, this or that model was better - which is a very low value data point.

They are really getting desperate. The bubble is coming closer to an end here.

Does OpenRouter eat this cost to get their hands on a copy of the conversations people are using with the model?

For context, Stripe has just acquired OpenRouter for >$7B.

I’d bet that explains this move!

How can they do this? Are they subsidizing it out of pocket?

Terra is also a fantastic model.

GPT-5.6 sol starting to be a real workhorse at this price point

It shocks me how little people seem to care that they are supporting an evil Zionist lizard man who molested his sister and is happy supporting trump. Doesn’t even come up in the conversation here. I don’t really care if sol is a bit better, I still make decisions on more than that.

Is the HN community just too online and sucked in to the musk mind manipulation vortex? Or what is going on? Why does nobody seem to care?

Can we get it for the reduced rate direct from OpenAI though?

Do other people find 5.6 to be worse at most simple tasks and frequently over complicate things?

I asked it to write a user todo and it turned out a four page essay. I gave the same task to 5.4 and got the small list of checkboxes I expected.

Absolutely not

I’ve used Claude exclusively for the past few months

Was excited when Sol came out a few weeks ago and loaded it up

I made the mistake of treating it as if it were Claude - I’d assumed they were close enough in ability and treated them that way

Well, turns out my instruction sets for Claude are 100% too complicated for Sol

Sol made the stupidest assumptions, constantly did things that it wasn’t asked to do and always approached code in what I considered a weird way - I had redo a lot of my prompts to get it anywhere close

Now, did it do good work?

Yes, on occasion. But with LLMs and coding, consistency is the name of the game. Constantly having to correct the LLM and constantly feeling paranoid that it won’t listen makes for an exhausting session

Maybe if you “came up” in the codex world you’re more fluent with it, but sticking with Claude for now

[flagged]

[dead]

[flagged]

[dead]

[dead]

[flagged]

Oh hey, that's cheaper than Kimi K3! Amusing to see a SOTA OpenAI model be cheaper than a Chinese open weight model.

Fwiw I love K3 and use it as a daily driver. I haven't tried Sol, as I dislike OpenAI.