A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.
Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.
But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.
Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.
Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead.
It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a mere 8 tokens per second. OpenAI is offering 32 tokens per second (4x faster), 4 seconds latency (5x faster), and all for half the price of what Microsoft is charging for a vastly inferior experience.
And it's not just on OpenRouter; Vercel offers the same:
https://vercel.com/changelog/gpt-5-6-sol-is-50-off-on-ai-gat...
Doesn't seem like a smart business move.
You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,
A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.
Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.
But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.
Or it's "normal" market segmentation. OpenRouter users are more price sensitive in general, also a lot of enterprise users who can't switch easily are using the official API (or Bedrock or Azure) and you want to squeeze them as much as you can.
This imbalance of exchange means that OpenAI is getting something from this deal. Question what is exactly.
Seems reasonably clear to me? Potentially bringing in more customers who use OpenRouter for trying out all the models with rapid switching, enticing them to use Sol. And anyone being routed on price will immediately be switched to OpenAI's servers instead.
It also seems to be providing a vastly better user experience - Azure has less than 99% uptime (Azure USA only has 87% uptime), latency of 20 - 30 seconds, and a mere 8 tokens per second. OpenAI is offering 32 tokens per second (4x faster), 4 seconds latency (5x faster), and all for half the price of what Microsoft is charging for a vastly inferior experience.
Data taken from this page:
https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol#providers
Literally all OEMs do this, if you go to Apple site you won't see any sales, but Amazon and other retailers will have stuff at 20% off regularly
That's weird.
Maybe they (oai) want to pump their marketshare on openrouter lol
Why is that weird?
How is that not weird?
Has OpenAI struck a deal with openrouter and that's why we're seeing preferred pricing?
Is openrouter taking a loss on sol API calls to grow adoption?
How temporary is the reduction in price?
Selling cheaper through what should be a minor third party, than through the first, party is super weird in commerce.
So the title is misleading, intentionally.