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

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.

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...

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.

For API usage, sure. But plenty of people have subscriptions where these differences effectively don’t matter.

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.

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.

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.

These are the pre rug pull prices. They'll increase prices 10x and nerf the models after they IPO.

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 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.

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.

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.

You also need to compare allowances on Codex vs. Claude Code

Grok is offering a competitive product - not the absolute best but among the top three. They are doing for $2 and 6/mio. So maybe they see it as taking the economic opportunity while their model lags slightly behind. OpenAi follows. I can't say if their models are economically better or they are taking the loss but they can still pull it. SpaceXAI has an interesting path forward. They are not out.

> 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

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.

> 50% cheaper

Cache read/write decrease by 50% or similar? That's where most (95%+) of the cost is for agentic coding workloads.

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?

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