Comment by pookieinc
5 hours ago
I don't see how anyone can be using Claude with prices like this, it's pretty incredible what the OpenAI team is doing, w.r.t model quality and pricing.
Prices per 1M tokens Claude Opus 5.5 Claude Opus 5
Cache reads $0.20 $0.50
Input tokens $4 $5
Output tokens $20 $25
Cache writes $5 $6.25
Model
Input
Output
Price reduction
GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol
$4 → $2
$20 → $10
50% cheaper
GPT‑6 Luna vs. GPT‑5.6 Luna
$0.20 → $0.10
$1.20 → $0.50
50% cheaper
I mainly use Codex/Sol to review my plans drafted by Fable. But beyond that, Astra blows through usage limits too fast to be a daily driver and writes weird code despite what my "house style" is, and Codex is behind Claude Code in terms of critical features like seeing what's going on in subagents.
The parent + subagent workflow has become critical for keeping the reasoning agent (parent) context-lean while also letting me chat to the main agent while work is getting done.
My main process is to use Fable to reason and then spawn Opus subagents, and I get amazing results, and I'm always looking into what the subagents are doing.
Astra is:
- Unbearably slow
- A token eating machine like no other
- Constantly compacting
- A model (like other GPT ones) that hides thinking traces and thinking summaries, which infuriates me
I've been in the Claude camp for a while, but the way it writes has left me with a a brick for a brain and wanted to see if Astra was as good as they say. Well, I can't know, because in the time it takes for it to actually build anything useful, I've moved to other ideas.
Unbearably, annoyingly slow. I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong.
Have you tweaked the reasoning level? “High” can mean different things across different models.
It also feels slow for me and compacts often.
However, it is not a 'token eating machine'. In fact it uses a third of the output tokens of Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, or Opus 5.
17k for Astra xhigh vs 61-66k.
1 reply →
Also, batch processing prices are still 50% off, which put GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna at $5 and $0.25 for output.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing?latest-pricin...
The major difference being the 1M token context window. Once you exceed 272K input tokens, Codex Sol is roughly the same price as Opus; and Astra similar to Fable.
For API usage, sure. But plenty of people have subscriptions where these differences effectively don’t matter.
It should matter; if their costs go down you'll get more usage.
Just because a provider is charging less, doesn't mean their cost went down. This is probably especially true with the big players that are trying to stay competitive.
>I don't see how anyone can be using Claude with prices like this
One potential deciding point is that Claude still has a $200/mo 20x plan, where, since Sept 11, OpenAI does not and has no ETA for the return.
I downgraded my OpenAI plan 2 months ago to the $100/mo, but my usage has gone way up, but now I can no longer upgrade to the $200/mo plan ("This option is temporarily unavailable"). Thankfully I have 2 usage resets available, but I'll probably be switching back to Claude; I was super happy with Astra but I'm burning through tokens and have 4 days before my next reset.
Opus 5.5 is incredible so far, its going to get used. Fable is much better than Astra for me in practice, and Sol is not marketed as better.
Its a great release, I will use both heavily.
>> GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol
>> $4 → $2
>> $20 → $10
Do you mean 100% more expensive? GPT 6 is 100% more expensive than 5.6 per your post.
It's before and after following the arrow. 6 is the cheaper one.
then it should be GPT 5.6 Sol vs. GPT 6 Sol
This is how the price cut is portrayed on OpenAI’s site. They are trying to say the prices have moved from the higher ones to the lower ones.
Yes very poor proofreading!
As someone who has used Claude Code and Codex the prices don't matter in the same way but I found that I burned through my usage way faster on Codex even though I regularly hear that the Codex plans go further. That was not my experience and the intelligence was comparable to what I was getting in Claude.
If these price changes mean that coding plans have effectively more usage then that's great, but Codex is surviving on resets from my own experience using it. I was glad to go back to Claude.
Not that anthropic models are very good at this, but due to the changes in tokenizers and thinking tokens: cost per token is not as helpful anymore as cost / task.
I could already run Sol High on 3 concurrent side projects 24/7 and not run out of quota.
This is great, but practically, I'm not going to start working on more side projects.
Perhaps in another 6-12 months I'll be fine to drop down to $20/m instead of $200.
How much does it cost you per month to have that much sol high usage and what do you use, api? Through what? Thank you
$200/mo
A lot of what I'm doing has pretty expensive build/testing processes between iterations - even on a 40 core machine - so I'm not burning tokens 24/7 like some people may.
I'd guess I'm probably spending >50% of the time running tests & build processes & tooling and the remainder is purely burning tokens.
I also have some internal tooling (that I will hopefully open source soon) that makes LLMs substantially more correct (thus more efficient) - so there's that, too.
1 reply →
they said quota so i would imagine the $200 subscription. Probably through Codex or Pi coding agents.
You can now start to add automations on top of typical dev flows.
There are a ton of use cases that open up with cheaper models.
E.g. extensive security scanning on every PR, quality scans, adversarial reviews etc
A vs B
Should be B vs A correct?
Else it's confusing
The last time I gave GPT a shot, it ate all my tokens and got nothing meaningful done.
If you told us which model that was or roughly when, then your comment would be more helpful.
> it's pretty incredible what the OpenAI team is doing
We don't know how much they are bleeding financially, it might just be a front
You also need to compare allowances on Codex vs. Claude Code
I legit question if these prices are still inference-profitable for OpenAI. They likely didn't have 100% profit margin.
Disagree. I would never use OpenAI cause they're probably just going to steal whatever I'm working on.
See I will never use anthropic because they run inference on spacex. Wat den een sien Uhl, is den annern sien Nachtigall.
What’s your problem with spacex? Do you have Elon derangement syndrome?
1 reply →
and anthropic won't? or any other inference provider? Running your own inference either locally or remotely are probably the only ways to make sure that doesn't happen.
Well we know for a fact that OpenAI steals Millennium Problem work from researchers. Have we seen anything similar from Anthropic?
1 reply →
What are you working on? Is any of it actually worth stealing?
And why is that bad? As your brain gets older, it will not remain so clever, so you'll be grateful for an AI that thinks like you do when it comes to your line of work, failing which the quality of your output could recede like your hairline.
Are you really comparing LLMs to brains?
1 reply →
>so you'll be grateful for an AI that thinks like you do when it comes to your line of work.
Highly subjective take
What kind of work do you do, out of curiosity
These are the pre rug pull prices. They'll increase prices 10x and nerf the models after they IPO.
Okay? I didn’t sign a 10 year contract. We’re month to month and I use my own harness.
If they’re subsidizing my usage, that’s great.
You're building your livelihood/workflows on a set of inputs that you have no idea what they actually cost or how reliable they'll be when the VC cash stops flowing. If you're OK with that, do your thing but it seems a little foolish to me.
5 replies →
That would only work if OpenAI were a monopoly, which they are not.
Before IPO. This is why Anthropic isn't playing the same games
there are still competitive market forces for co's post IPO
GPT would charge more if they could. Both companies need way way more revenue. GPT simply made a calculation that they can earn more money by charging less than their competitors.
Of course they'd charge more if they could... Of course they're pricing to outcompete their competitor...
They also have postponed their IPO. So they don't have to be profitable that soon. Anthropic on the other hand plans to do the IPO this fall.
HN discovers competition leads to lower prices
They're cutting prices because they want to cannabalize the market for people using models like deepseek via API as well as people paying for anthropic subs.
When they cut prices on luna the first time around they took (literally) millions of users from anthropic.
Any business would charge more if they could. Jevon's paradox would mean that they can make more money by charging less because demand is going to keep growing.
FWIW, what you're describing is a simple demand curve, not Jevons paradox.
The "paradox" is when an increase in efficiency which would decrease the use of a resource all else equal, instead indirectly causes more use.
1 reply →
> 50% cheaper
Cache read/write decrease by 50% or similar? That's where most (95%+) of the cost is for agentic coding workloads.
Yes, still 20% of input cost.
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/pricing
These don’t necessarily reflect actual costs, OpenAI is not profitable and nowhere near. They’ve lost their market lead and Sam may feel they need to get it back with any means necessary.
Wtf is GPT-6 Sol, I though GPT-6 is Astra?
Number is generation Name is the size (Luna smallest to Astra largest)
Then what is Astra high-extra high-Ultra? That’s effort within each tier?
2 replies →
It's just another step on the timeline.
GPT-5.6-Sol, GPT-5.6-Terra, and GPT-5.6-Luna were released in July of 2026.
The first release from the GPT-6 series was GPT-6-Astra. GPT-6-Astra happened on around September 3, 2026, and the previously-mentioned GPT-5.6-* widgets remained available.
Today, September 22, 2026, we now also have GPT-6-Sol and GPT-6-Luna added into the mix.
As I write this, all of the model identifiers I've mentioned are available to select for use within Codex.
Just released 6-Sol and 6-luna a few hours ago
[dead]