OpenAI Slashes GPT-5.6 Sol API Prices by 50%
GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%
OpenRouter now lists GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship model, with a 50% price cut on API access. Input costs drop to $2.50 per million tokens, and output to $15, with cache reads at $0.25. The model, released July 9, 2026, features a 1M context window and excels in complex reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows. Performance benchmarks show strong results on GPQA Diamond and TAU-Bench, with top uptime across providers.
GPT-5.6 Sol is the flagship model in OpenAI's GPT-5.6 series, suited for complex reasoning, coding, and agentic workflows, and is particularly strong at command-line and multi-step coding tasks and long-horizon problem solving.
- pimeys
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.
- netsec_burn
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.
- johnnyApplePRNG
OpenAI is making some really boneheaded moves these days.
They're reacting instead of leading, basically.
Cutting API prices 50% while millions of your paying subscribers have had their limits slashed and are all literally looking at the salivatingly-cheap chinese API prices availalbe on openrouter...
Not only did OpenAI and all of their cash somehow MISS the opportunity to purchase OpenRouter ...
Now they're giving a discount on an API that nobody even uses (get real, nobody's paying API prices to OpenAI ...
I calculated a 5.6 sol coding session the other day ... $680+ USD ... and it actually destroyed the codebase it was working on during that session).
Needless to say, I will not be spending another dime with Codex or OpenAI.
This entire Codex reset limit fiasco has taught me they are not to be trusted.
Deepseek, here I come.
- johnnyApplePRNG
The really frightening part for OpenAI, should be that apparently nobody seems to care. [0]
Their token usage on 5.6 Sol isn't even expected to double today.
- onlyrealcuzzo
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...
- Fergusonb
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
- resonious
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
- kelvinjps10
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
- CompoundEyes
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.
- z_rho_one
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.