Comment by SyneRyder

It might also be worth noting that the discount is only if OpenAI itself is used as the provider via OpenRouter. The discount does not exist for Azure or Amazon hosted Sol.

I posted elsewhere, but the Azure uptime & performance for Sol is truly dire. OpenAI is offering 5x faster latency, 4x faster tokens generation, and vastly better uptime (Azure US has only 87% uptime), all for 50% of the price now. I assume the pricing is to compete with other shiny new models (Grok, Qwen etc), but it might also be to cut-off a truly poorly performing Microsoft hosting experience.