GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%

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.

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...

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

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.

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?

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.

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 ?

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.

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

I'm loving this race to the bottom.

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.

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

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

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

I’d bet that explains this move!

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

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

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.

Terra is also a fantastic model.

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

No ZDR. No dice.

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

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

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

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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.