Hard to estimate what enabled the price cuts,
Yet OpenAI is doing some magic work, especially recently.
GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
301–310 of 479 posts
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#302dang, to avoid confusion from the title perhaps this should be edited to: “OpenRouter temporarily cutting GPT-5.6 Sol pricing by 50%”
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find all effort levels of sol are the same in terms of amount of hallucinated unnecessary changes. Luna is much better all round on xhigh but my point still stands, every release of these new models is not an upgrade, its re-learning how to work with it. Its like rehiring an employee every few months then training them up. Its honestly tiring and cant stay like this. Opus has the same problem too…
That's not been my experience. My prompting methods haven't changed much between recent GPT releases. I do put a lot of effort into building tooling and tests around a project, so the LLM output is converging around it.
Can you give examples of the tooling and tests?
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#304dang, to avoid confusion from the title perhaps this should be edited to: “OpenRouter temporarily cutting GPT-5.6 Sol pricing by 50%”
That suggests this is being funded by OpenRouter, and there's no indication this is the case (and I doubt OpenRouter can afford it; why would they anyway).
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.
Doesn't seem like a smart business move. You're literally encouraging someone else to come in and steal your customer base,
A surprising amount of companies sell exact the same product through different channels for different prices. A good example is Apple.
Multiple times a year, retailers here in Australia have co-ordinated sales on Apple products. Apple.com or their retail stores don't have these sales.
But they're clearly Apple-funded when competing retailers launch the same sales on the same days; and the margins aren't enough for retailers to take a loss.
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#306The 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 o…
> And these models are not going away, nor their prices going up [...] Well, DeepSeek just raised prices.
And Fireworks did not yet. They are still under the limit of not feasible to self host... Let's see if other providers follow DeepSeek with their flash pricing.
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#307If 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.
I don’t think there’s a real answer for this. Margin depends on whatever number the accounting department wants to make up. Do you include research and training costs? Of all models or only the ones being served? What percent of the R&D budget do you allocate to inference? What about data center capacity? Do you count future commitments? All the circular financing deals? Do you count employee equity grants as costs?…
We have a simple definition for this: COGS.
We also have another solution for "whatever accounting decides": generally accepted accounting practices. It's far from perfect, but GAAP figures are what you should be looking at; not "adjusted GAAP" or whatever invention.
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#308The 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 o…
> Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. I assume it's highly use case dependent, though? Even before the price cut seems like Sol was price competitive with Kimi https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig... And now it should be considerably cheaper
Long-context agentic tasks and Rust engineering are our use cases where Kimi definitely is better than Sol. We can measure our own systems and the numbers say that Sol has no chance against K3 or Opus, and K3 is so so so much cheaper than Opus right now.
You cannot just look at the price tags for these models, you must eval and see the price per task. In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results. Kimi does not have these issues, it's just as good as Opus with a smaller price tag.
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#309Since it's only discounted on the standard "OpenAI," non-ZDR route (old pricing on Azure), I'm guessing a lot of users won't see this benefit? Since a lot of users enable a global "ZDR-only" toggle on OR
It would seem that getting lots of data is exactly the reason to discount this.
OpenAI says they don't use any API data for training.
(there's probably going to be a reply about 'but how can you trust them'; I'm just stating what they say)
Re: GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
#310Hard to estimate what enabled the price cuts, Yet OpenAI is doing some magic work, especially recently.
Hard to estimate? Everyone knows the elephant in the room: capable open weight models.