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GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter
- dgunay 2mo agoI'm loving this race to the bottom.
- infinite_spin 2mo agoI'm not having that experience. So far each major model update has been at least slightly better than the last, in ways I've found useful. Can't say it's perfect, or able to do exactly what I want without a decent amount of instruction/implementation/docs, but it's been useful enough to keep paying for it.
- fn-mote 2mo agoGP means race to the bottom in price not quality.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- dgunay 2mo agoOh no the models are absolutely getting better, I'm just amazed that only 6 months ago I was using gpt-5.3-codex, and now I can use gpt-5.6-luna for similar results at like 1/15th the cost. Now 5.6-sol is being slashed by 50%? Amazing.
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- Fergusonb 2mo agoLuna 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
- OutOfHere 2mo agoSince when does Grok 4.6 have Sol 5.6's intelligence? I don't believe it.
- redox99 2mo agoIt doesn't.
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoI wonder if xAI is A/B testing routing some difficult grok 4.6 queries to Sol to seed some true believers.
- dimgl 2mo agoWhy not?
- chaos_emergent 2mo agoBecause it’s good on benchmarks but not on real usage?
- dimgl 2mo agoBut OP said they've never used it. How would they know?
- maxdo 2mo agoI do have free sol and cursor ultra for 200 I prefer grok over sol, they are equally capable but grok is faster
- qingcharles 2mo agoI use Grok 4.6 every day; it's good, but it's not Opus 5 or Sol 5.6. The gap is closing, though.
- xmonkee 2mo agoIt's really only between Anthropic and OpenAI for many of my use cases, since I have a Zero Data Retention agreement with both. I'm not trusting random inference providers and especially not Elmo with sensitive data.
- vorpalhex 2mo agoDo 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.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoIt's your responsibility to set an appropriate level of Thinking. For simple tasks, I use the instant model. As an approximation, the choice is proportional to the amount of time I want it spending on the task. Also, you can always ask it to respond succinctly.
- code_biologist 2mo ago[dead]
- dimgl 2mo agoYep. I have not yet had a single good experience with Sol or the 5.6 models on a variety of harnesses and configurations. It overthinks, overcomplicates and often makes my code into an unmaintainable sludge. It'll usually take 5+ turns of steering to get it in the right direction.
- qup 2mo agoI've found it to be great for planning code changes (or new projects). I use the superpowers plug-in which I think guides the planning. Then I switch models (to luna) before implementation. I find this combo nearly always does what I want. I also use a skill called ponytail, its goal is to keep things terse and edits small. It may have contributed to the successes above. I like that skills are easy to try out, too.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoThe 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 https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol
- paxys 2mo agoWhich raises the question - who is subsidizing this, and why?
- internetter 2mo agoPossibly OAI? If you have OAI tokens you are a captive audience. If you have OpenRouter you are bidding on a free market. OpenRouter attributes this promotion to OpenAI https://x.com/OpenRouter/status/2089416739398254662 https://x.com/OpenRouter/status/2089416739398254662
- paxys 2mo agoIs this captive audience not going to switch providers for a 50% discount? Especially when the effort is simply swapping one URL for another?
- maxnevermind 2mo agoWhy though, to AB test/see the impact of a price cut on a platform with multiple competitors?
- OutOfHere 2mo agoOpenRouter is likely just leveraging Codex subscriptions.
- prime_ursid 2mo agoWouldn’t that be against TOS?
- josh-wrale 2mo agoIs this motivated by the value of the thinking traces gleaned from the traffic?
- ec109685 2mo agoThey can’t decrypt the thinking traces.
- dannyw 2mo agoYou can train a LLM to inverse summarised thinking into thinking text. It’s not perfect, but it gets you maybe 80% of the quality with proper techniques. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07267 https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07267 FWIW, there’s not that much value protected here anyway IMHO, and even raw thinking text can lie (as shown by Anthropic’s amazing research), so for legitimate interpretability research it’s limited. Scaling frontier performance hasn’t been SFT-bounded for a while now; it’s now basically how much you can scale RL rollouts.
- killingtime74 2mo agoThe thinking traces are server-side, not exposed
- CompoundEyes 2mo agoI 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.
- jm4 2mo agoI can’t sign up for that. I tried authorizing Codex a couple days ago. For some reason, their system says my phone number has been used for verification 3 times even though it definitely has not. I’ve had this phone number for over 20 years. OpenAI support is useless. They just keep repeating the policy without actually helping me.
- jaggederest 2mo agoGet a burner and use it? If you're spending $200/mo on something, $40 or whatever for a burner phone seems like a pretty cheap price.
- paxys 2mo agoYou can get a phone number online for a few dollars.
- jaggederest 2mo agoHistorically those are less useful because some of the verification systems require a real phone number and that your name is associated with the account, depending on what and how they verify. It's annoying, I use a google voice number as my primary, and it often gets rejected.
- qingcharles 2mo agoGood2Go is $5/mo for a real SIM with unlimited talk/text + 1GB data.
- fireant 2mo ago
- m4rtink 2mo agoPrice wars did wonders for many businesses, like the bike sharing industry in China. Overgrown datacenters or mounds of GPUs dumped into the harbour next ?
- Moto7451 2mo agoI would in such a scenario expect the GPUs to be dumped to industrial breakers who would send them to China for refurbishment and repackaging before being sold again on Amazon, AliExpress, and Taobao as last gen gaming cards from weird brands and specs. This is what happened after the great crypto GPU dumping.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agoThe e-waste recyclers are pretty low on the pecking order, as the creditors will be first to strip these places for assets as Leopold Aschenbrenner discovered. =3
- Moto7451 2mo agoIt's where the stuff ultimately goes since the creditors aren't interested in GPUs that no longer have much value. The context here is a crash, not just a basic bankruptcy. If it were that then absolutely it would be impounded by creditors (virtually or in reality) and then sold to the highest bidding data center.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo ago>creditors aren't interested in GPUs that no longer have much value Indeed, there is a point where the cost of disposal is higher than the expected market value of components. Thus, the asset turns into a liability if held too long. I have seen factory liquidations, and everything goes... right down to the bolts in the floors. =3
- m4rtink 2mo agoYeah, I ment it as a joke - I agree with you. Watched the Gamers Nexus GPU investigation recently, where they were shown how a chinese soldering shop can transplant GPU chips to a new board, including memory chip reuse. Hopefully we can look forward to all that useless datacenter AI crap gets repurposed in a similar manner into something actually useful for users.
- z_rho_one 2mo agoIf 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.
- paxys 2mo agoI 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? At what valuation?
- dannyw 2mo agoWe 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.
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoOpenAI didn't cut the price of Sol by 50% like they did with Luna's 80%. Sol was unchanged. This is just a limited promo for OpenRouter non-BYOK.
- josu 2mo agoI always find it funny that Japanese pensioners are probably subsidizing my tokens.
- tartakovsky 2mo agoNo ZDR. No dice.
- netsec_burn 2mo agoAfter 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.
- Razengan 2mo agoI recently tried Claude again after several months, to see if it was any better at something Codex has been struggling with… They STILL don't have an option to "Sign in with Apple" on the website, but they do for Google??!? (and on iPhone of course) Screw that asinine UX (and no it wasn't better than Codex at this particular task)
- nozzlegear 2mo agoThat was an issue at least a year ago. I had signed up for a claude account on my iPhone and then wanted to sign in on my laptop but nope, not possible. Insane they still haven't fixed it. Can somebody at Anthropic tag claude in slack or whatever goofy shit you do and ask it to add Apple OAuth to your website? Clearly humans aren't testing it.
- Razengan 2mo agoI signed up on iOS, Sign In with Apple, cause I don't go around giving random companies my actual email if I can help it and sure enough, I was right to do so: They don't even let you remove your payment method afterwards. Every other store, Steam etc., lets you. No way I have enough trust to install their desktop app after that, so I just want to try it through their website.. Can Sign In with Google, but not with Apple so you gotta open the Passwords app, copy your random email, paste into the website, then copy the OTP from your email.. It's been that way for at least a year The desktop app was clunky too the last couple times I tried it a few months ago and the AI itself hasn't been that hot compared to ChatGPT/Codex either: https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png https://i.imgur.com/jYawPDY.png So all the Claude hype posted on HN seems like a case of the emperor with no clothes to me (P.S. The thing I just now tried to do on Claude hit the weekly usage limit after 2 minutes)
- ComputerGuru 2mo agoDoes OpenRouter eat this cost to get their hands on a copy of the conversations people are using with the model?
- 9cb14c1ec0 2mo agoNo, this is OpenAI doing the discount, not Openrouter by themselves. OpenAI is crushing it with their 5.6 models, and they probably decided there was no better time to grab as much market share as possible.
- Noaidi 2mo agoI don’t understand this at all. They have never been profitable yet. How is this helping them? When it be more likely the case that not enough, people are using it as the prices they established already? So now they have to lower the prices?
- nprateem 2mo agoThey're prepping to IPO. They want top level metrics like usage they can use to pump investors, not nonsense like profitability.
- ipaddr 2mo agoYou lower prices for marketshare. Fable became a mythological model to leadership because they were the first story of ai escaping and hacking another company. The it's so dangerous the public can't use it narrative is sticky so OpenAI is showing off its model so as many eyeballs as possible. We're in the samples in the supermarket phase.
- ComputerGuru 2mo agoBut the discount is only available via OpenRouter.
- voiper1 2mo agoOpenRouter offers 1% discount to save your conversations, explicitly opt-in. Anything else they don't save it. Even if they tell you the model provider saves your data for training.
- dvrp 2mo agoFor context, Stripe has just acquired OpenRouter for >$7B. I’d bet that explains this move!
- indigodaddy 2mo agoWhy would the potential acquisition have anything to do with this? They do discounts all the time on various models. Luna was 50% off last week..
- gip 2mo agoNot sure as OpenAI models (Sol, Luna,..) are also discounted on the Vercel AI Gateway rn. My bet is on OpenAI trying to drive more enterprise customers to their models through API.
- lyjackal 2mo agoI 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
- senectus1 2mo ago[dead]
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- therepanic 2mo agoEven at these prices, switching from subsidized subscriptions to the API just isn't worth it. Not even close.
- Scene_Cast2 2mo agoOh 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.
- drivebyhooting 2mo agoHas 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.
- Topology1 2mo agoHow can they do this? Are they subsidizing it out of pocket?
- gxs 2mo agoAbsolutely 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
- iammrpayments 2mo agoWhy are you being downvoted, is this post an ad or something.
- dana321 2mo ago"rewrite unreal engine in rust, make no mistakes"
- gxs 2mo agoThat’s exactly what I did! How’d you know? Didn’t mean to make you upset sorry
- throwatdem12311 2mo agoAt 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.
- jeffybefffy519 2mo agoReading 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.
- tonyhart7 2mo agoits over engineered problem solver ???? well because its a designed to do that if you want to solve basic problem then use Luna
- jeffybefffy519 2mo agoI mean it added additional changes when it doesnt need to. Its basically hallucinating changes it thinks it needs to make regardless of effort levels i try.
- SadErn 2mo ago[dead]
- jeswin 2mo agoIt depends on what effort you're using etc. As an example [1] of what codex is capable of, here's hugo (written in golang) ported to TypeScript - and then a TypeScript to Rust transpiler which converts arbitrary TypeScript into Rust. The TypeScript code which was transpiled into Rust (and is compatible with most hugo templates) runs faster than the original hugo. [1]: https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic-examples/tree/main/rust/tsumo/generated/packages https://github.com/tsoniclang/tsonic-examples/tree/main/rust... The transpiler is still WIP, but the fact that it can do this says a lot of about how far LLMs have come.
- jeffybefffy519 2mo ago
- onlyrealcuzzo 2mo agoThis 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...
- andai 2mo agoYou do it if you can afford to do it and your competitor can't.
- psadri 2mo agoWho are OpenRouter’s competitors?
- aurareturn 2mo agoOpenRouter doesn't decide on the pricing.
- resonious 2mo agoThey do decide on the 5% markup. But as far as I can tell, all other routers just match 5%. Not sure what they're competing on.
- aurareturn 2mo agoYes but Sol dropping in price by 50% is not OpenRouter deciding. It's OpenAI.
- mcintyre1994 2mo agoI don’t think that’s true. OpenAI docs don’t have this price change. I assume they’d be the source for this post if it was true. The banner on OpenRouter for me says Gemini 3.7 discounted for a limited time, but if I click through that I get to this page: https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true https://openrouter.ai/models?discount=true That shows a bunch of models, including Sol, with a discount. None of them say how long it’s for, but I’d assume in all their cases it’s for a limited time as the banner said, and only on OpenRouter.
- krzyk 2mo agoIs this pricing change only for openrouter? I don't see official OpenAI info about this.
- Bombthecat 2mo agoI was wondering the same, and it clearly says : 50% off, aka a sale, not normal price cut. I don't get this thread.... Really. Is it full of bots?
- brynnbee 2mo agoI doubt bots, the linked page is really boring to read and looks like a dashboard instead of easily consumed reading. I think people are therefore drawing conclusions from the headline more than usual since the link makes the real information sort of opaque. However it's ignorant to think that there aren't bots on HN and especially for the very many motives people have for swaying public opinion.
- shevy-java 2mo agoThey are really getting desperate. The bubble is coming closer to an end here.
- ben8bit 2mo agoTerra is also a fantastic model.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoDoes this mean less subscription credit usage as well?
- Tadpole9181 2mo agoIt just looks like OpenRouter is doing a 50% sale on some models right now? Until OpenAI makes an announcement, I would assume no.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoOpenRouter doesn't do sales, they charge a premium, which is a flat 5.5% taken out of your credits. If you see something cheap on OpenRouter, it's because that one provider lowered its price. (Actually, correction, they will take 0.5% off their fee if you allow them to train your content) Here are all the providers giving discounts: https://openrouter.ai/collections/discounted-models https://openrouter.ai/collections/discounted-models Another thing some people don't notice is flex pricing, which is way lower than default pricing, for slightly worse latency and reliability. Depends on the provider and model
- kaycey2022 2mo agoNo because i am still losing 50% of my weekly quota using sol on high.
- Bob_bo 2mo ago[dead]
- aetherspawn 2mo agoCan we get it for the reduced rate direct from OpenAI though?
- stillpointlab 2mo agoI 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.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo ago> my last big task was 100% Codex using Sol max (re-sizing my AWS infrastructure using CDK) Fwiw, you could do this with any small or medium model, and it's easier with the aws-docs mcp. AWS is pretty stable, well documented, and programmatic, so most AI can figure out what it needs pretty quick
- stillpointlab 2mo agoI'm not claiming an eval on what is or isn't possible. Rather I am stating my satisfaction with what I actually used and the actual result I obtained. What I can say is that over the course of ~1 week I was able to review, plan, implement, test and release a significant change to a production system using Code Sol max. Any other claim about how any other model might have completed the same task is outside of my experience.
- gutterscale 2mo agoGPT-5.6 sol starting to be a real workhorse at this price point
- claiir 2mo agoSince 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
- stavros 2mo agoIt would seem that getting lots of data is exactly the reason to discount this.
- dannyw 2mo agoOpenAI 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)
- stavros 2mo agoDoes OpenRouter say the same?
- solenoid0937 2mo agoUnless it's in your contract, they will use the data. They might not be using it now, but they will eventually.
- resonious 2mo agoWhere 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 https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-5.6-sol
- mirzap 2mo agoIt's discounted if used via OpenRouter, not the official API.
- oblio 2mo agoThat's weird.
- not-kinsale-joe 2mo agoWhy is that weird?
- Mattrou 2mo agoHow is that not weird? Has OpenAI struck a deal with openrouter and that's why we're seeing preferred pricing? Is openrouter taking a loss on sol API calls to grow adoption? How temporary is the reduction in price?
- oblio 2mo agoSelling cheaper through what should be a minor third party, than through the first, party is super weird in commerce.
- JCharante 2mo agoMaybe they (oai) want to pump their marketshare on openrouter lol
- cute_boi 2mo agoAny benefit of pumping marketshare on open router?
- kelvinjps10 2mo agoI 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
- gb2d_hn 2mo agoI switched as I felt Codex was on a par with Opus, but the chat responses from Sol are just more intelligible than the word soup I've been getting from Opus. I wonder if Opus could be prompted to respond in simpler prose via agents.md
- marcyb5st 2mo agoAh, so I am not the only one struggling with deciphering Opus writing style. At times I feel dumb as a rock because I read the same passage like 5 times and I still don't get it.
- FluffyPancake 2mo agoI have also noticed that I am increasingly struggling to read what LLMs are writing, finding it incomprehensible half the time. I stole Matt Pocock's line of "When reporting information to me, be extremely concise and sacrifice grammar for the sake of concision." for the agents.md It makes it a little better. I also specify to use https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish/ https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish/ for all writing it does including code comments. It all feels like a bandaids but that seems to be the best we can do right now.
- jen729w 2mo ago> I wonder if Opus could be prompted to respond in simpler prose via agents.md God knows I've tried. I've got a variant of the ASD-STE100 trick which does the job, mostly, at the start … but get to about 100k of context and it goes out the window. The model's personality is too strong for simple suggestion, alas.
- bigbluedots 2mo agoThese threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based. Yes, something may now be cheaper or more expensive or whatever, but there is no way to objectively measure quality (except for "trust me bro" benchmarks). So the discourse is people saying that for them, this or that model was better - which is a very low value data point.
- oblio 2mo ago> These threads seem to have become exceedingly vibes-based. If you remember programming language discussions, they are exactly like this. Software development is still in the leeches and bloodlettings phase.
- bigbluedots 2mo agoYes, programming language discussions can be vibes-based and therefore low value too, but sometimes the more concrete aspects of the languages at hand, e.g. language features and tradeoffs are discussed. That is something that I'm not seeing in equivalent AI discussions.. there is a lot of how a particular AI model "feels" to interact with.
- pessimizer 2mo agoIt's got to be because AI has become a commodity, people are looking to get the best value for money, and things change based on your specific application (which may be nearly unique) and literally the time of day. It's a bunch of bread bakers talking about wheat suppliers.
- floki165 2mo ago[flagged]
- mohammedmsgm 2mo ago[flagged]
- hk__2 2mo agoIn my experience, "Sol" stands for "Stupid overengineering LLM". I’ve tried it at low/medium/high/xhigh effort levels and after a while I always end up to regretting my switch from Opus/Fable.
- egorfine 2mo agoSlightly unrelated: what's up with the "tps" value? Does GPT-5.6 Sol really deliver just 32 tokens/second?
- kristo 2mo agoIt shocks me how little people seem to care that they are supporting an evil Zionist lizard man who molested his sister and is happy supporting trump. Doesn’t even come up in the conversation here. I don’t really care if sol is a bit better, I still make decisions on more than that. Is the HN community just too online and sucked in to the musk mind manipulation vortex? Or what is going on? Why does nobody seem to care?
- ardel95 2mo agoMy bet is that OpenRouter began steering GPT-5.6-sol users towards flex tier, which is already 50% off. So this isn’t really a price cut. As to why, lots of possible reasons. Perhaps an agreement with OpenAI to help them drive up more diverse traffic priorities.
- pimeys 2mo agoThe 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.
- ywvcbk 2mo ago> 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-xhigh%2Ckimi-k3%2Cgpt-5-6-sol https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig... And now it should be considerably cheaper
- pimeys 2mo agoLong-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.
- mrngld 2mo agoChina's 50 Cent Party being a real and noticeable thing (and the two biggest things they like to shill is open weight Chinese models and the futility of resisting a Taiwan invasion), I have to take things like this with a healthy dose of skepticism without corroborating data, since independent evals didn't show the price per task lead you're showing. If there's independent data showing this feel free to share a link, I haven't seen it. DeepSWE has been most closely matching what I see in my own use.
- cmiles8 2mo agoThis 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.
- fatata123 2mo ago[dead]
- bwfan123 2mo ago> 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 Deepseek v4 and Kimi k3 have tightened the screws on the frontier models. With open-weights, anyone can host these for cost of compute. So, there is zero leverage left for the frontier labs. What implodes it in my view is that enterprise adoption will stall. Enterprises are struggling to actually use these things in real workflows outside of coding and support.
- chinagenie_ai 2mo ago[flagged]
- ronfriedhaber 2mo agoHard to estimate what enabled the price cuts, Yet OpenAI is doing some magic work, especially recently.
- dannyw 2mo agoHard to estimate? Everyone knows the elephant in the room: capable open weight models.
- bnrdr 2mo agodang, to avoid confusion from the title perhaps this should be edited to: “OpenRouter temporarily cutting GPT-5.6 Sol pricing by 50%”
- dannyw 2mo agoThat 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).
- bnrdr 2mo agoThere also doesn’t seem to be an official indication that this is funded by OpenAI, hence the confusion in the thread.
- panda008 2mo agoSol is really stable for me.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoOpenAI 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.
- raincole 2mo agoThat's some bonehead take. For very starter, neither the other AI companies nor the customers will trust OpenRouter if it's owned by OpenA. It'd be squeezed to death from both sides. The only reasonable way for OpenAI's investors to have a share of OpenRouter is to invest directly, not via 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). Yeah, sorry, skill issue. If you let AI run wild (if one session is $680 yeah it ran pretty wild) don't complain how it messed up your codebase.
- enraged_camel 2mo ago>> Yeah, sorry, skill issue. If you let AI run wild (if one session is $680 yeah it ran pretty wild) don't complain how it messed up your codebase. Not the OP, but I consider myself a skilled and heavy AI user, with multiple subscriptions in both platforms, plus OpenRouter. A couple of weeks ago I gave 5.6 Sol a small/medium sized ticket to simplify part of the auth system. The ticket had a lot of details another Sol agent had collected during an exploratory session, and it was all vetted by Opus 5. I thought to myself that the implementation agent should have everything it needs. I still had it write a plan just in case, read the plan, made sure it matched the ticket, then clicked Approve and walked away. I came back later that afternoon to a horror show. The agent had written 25,000+ LoC in the worktree. After 15 minutes of skimming through it, I realized that it had made the specced change, then convinced itself that it needed stronger verification, and over a series of compaction cycles ended up writing a static analysis harness so that it could prove that the change would be safe. Total bonkers. Except, according to another Sol agent I showed the worktree to, the harness didn't actually do what the original agent claimed. The review agent said 98% of the worktree's code should be thrown away, and only the fix and its relevant unit and integration tests should be retained. I also asked Opus 5, and it theorized that 5.6 Sol must have gone through too many compaction cycles and lost track of its original goal. This never happens to me with Claude models. Yes they write a lot of code and verbose comments, but I've never had a situation where a ticket that should take several hundred LoCs ended up with tens of thousands. When Claude overengineers something, I catch it during the planning phase, and it implements plans faithfully. 5.6 Sol is simply unreliable. It's too relentless and doesn't know when to stop. That's probably what caused the OP's $680 incident. I find it fascinating that people like it so much.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoThe 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. [0] https://openrouter.ai/openai https://openrouter.ai/openai
- ee334y5rthsrth 2mo agoThis could cause the AI market to crash. If companies can't make money off their users, their entire financial plan will collapse and their stock prices will plummet.
- xcupapps 2mo ago[dead]
- meerita 2mo agoThis is great news for everyone. We should celebrate they're really doing price competition.
- m101 2mo agoI think what is going on here is that OpenAI are employing price differentiation to capture more of the market. The captive API customers are already there. There are bunch of potential customers that are price sensitive and are at openrouter. This move allows them to capture more of the market and increase profits (yes, they might be increasing profits at this level)
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoYou don't just jump from model to model on openrouter because somebody slashed prices, though. People actually have to select and want to use Sol 5.6 in their routing.
- m101 2mo agoPerhaps not most but surely some, and in the future perhaps increasingly easily. I’d have thought that even today people would validate a number of models for certain tasks and on a daily basis go for the cheapest provider when they run that task.
- dewey 2mo agoOne of the selling points from openrouter is exactly that though, it makes it extremely easy to jump from model to model. For some background tasks for example I setup all the free models on openrouter and if one is not available it jumps to the next one.
- asd000hh 2mo agoCoool
- cs702 2mo agoTo me, it looks like the leading labs are investing more and more to improve their frontier models, and are being forced to charge less and less for them due to competitive pressure. Maybe I'm wrong, but "reasoning as a service" is looking more and more like a... commodity.
- largbae 2mo agoIs this about Kimi or about Claude? Anthropic is circulating a $200B 2028 revenue target ahead of their IPO. If OpenAI plans to stay private longer, which their recent liquidity event might suggest, why not try and kneecap their competition?
- timedude 2mo agoWhen are RAM prices getting cuts tho. It is getting fucking ridiculous.
- oliveralbertini 2mo agoit's cut for short context
- wahid_seddiqi 2mo agoThis is honestly impressive. Cutting the price by 50% while pushing a model this capable is exactly the kind of move that makes advanced AI feel genuinely accessible.
- hirak10 2mo ago[flagged]
- dat999zx 2mo ago[dead]
- bobkingdom 2mo ago[dead]