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GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

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Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#271

Post by edg5000 »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #210
edg5000 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI I run it consistently in xhigh regardless of difficulty of the task at hand. I remember high being very fast, but I'd rather wait a bit more and get better output. AIs are insanely fast compared to me anyway, even on xhigh. Consumes more usage, but even at 100 EUR/m I don't hit limits.

How do you handle context limits? With more thinking tokens you fill it up earlier. Compaction degrades performance too. What's your strategy?

Initially I was planning heavily around context limits, but I've learned to just ignore it completely. Compaction is seamless for me. If details are lost in compaction, the model just re-reads what's needed. My conclusion is that at least for Sol, the summaries (which I've never seen) must be amazing. Every now and then a detail gets lost and I have to repeat it. I don't think there is performance degration, because the model is smart enough to re-read relevant files as needed.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#272

Post by XCSme »

CompoundEyes wrote: post #15

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.

I am also on the pro $200 plan, the limit is high enough to do what I want for a week, and binge run Ultra Fast last day to use the remaining credits.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#273

Post by vineyardmike »

xscott wrote: post #149
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fable is almost unusable for anything but super boring mainstream stuff. I was getting safeguard flagged so often I’ve significantly reduced my usage out of fear they will blacklist/ban me. Some of the topics it’s flagged have been hard for me to understand what it seeing that can be remotely concerning in my requests.

I've gotten flagged for asking questions about tokens and tensors. That makes me believe it's not about safety, it's about protecting their turf. I cancelled my subscription - same fear about getting flagged too much leading to a ban.

They said they also block usage of Claude models to build ML models.

Which is definitely protecting their turf, but also probably a little bit hiding their “RSI” abilities for competitive reasons. My theory is that a lot of “safety blocking” is actually WIP training of new business directions. Anthropic has started hiring biologists and has opened a preview of a “Claude code for bioinformatics”. I’m guessing they’re tweaking their bioinformatics market play, and block “bio safety” requests so competitors can’t learn about their training.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#274

Post by XCSme »

kolinko wrote: post #254
z_rho_one wrote: post #20

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.

Or they have gotten new asics and can do now inference way cheaper

Why would they infer faster with new shoes?

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#275

Post by sumedh »

dvt wrote: post #183
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #137

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...

> This sure looks like a race to the bottom Always has been. My prediction is that both OpenAI and Claude will go bust unless they deliver a killer product. And unlike scrappy startups, they have a pretty serious deadline because creditors will come a-knockin'. There's little to no functional difference between Kimi, Qwen, Sol, Opus, etc. All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other and the real moat will b…

> All flagship models are within like 1-5% of each other

Depends on your use case. the Chinese models are not there yet.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#276

Post by josu »

dgellow wrote: post #252
josu wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it funny that Japanese pensioners are probably subsidizing my tokens.

What do you mean?

SoftBank is one of the largest investors in openAI having contributed more than 30B and pledged another 30.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#277

Post by SyneRyder »

podgorniy wrote: post #268
londons_explore wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't seem like a smart business move. You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,

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

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#278

Post by 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.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#279

Post by krzyk »

mirzap wrote: post #201
resonious wrote: post #196

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

It's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.

So the title is misleading, intentionally.

Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter

#280

Post by cmiles8 »

This is the opening salvos of an all out token price war.

With models a commodity at this point there isn’t much leverage for the big labs to keep their pricing anywhere near where it’s at. And that’s at the worst possible time as they need to be dramatically raising prices to have a viable business model.

Expect pricing to rapidly fall towards the underlying cost of compute and as players get really desperate we’ll likely see inference at less than the cost of compute as the market starts to rationalize and squeeze out weaker players who’s only play left will be to be the cheapest option in town.

The AI bubble is just waiting for the first player to scream mercy and cut capex as they simply can’t afford to throw more cash on the burning pile. That will be the trigger that implodes this bubble.

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