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GPT 5.6 Sol 20% price reduction
- Dhruvjoshi9 1mo ago[flagged]
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoLet me reword this for you: super cheap Asian frontier models can cause harm to your overpriced business model.
- claaams 1mo agoThis is AI slop commenting.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ReptileMan 1mo agoIf deepseek operate on 80% margins as some suggested, this means that OpenAI reduced theirs from 1600% to 1200%.
- himata4113 1mo agoProbably even higher because openai and anthropic undoubtably have the lowest cost per token generated, especially with cerebras being able to serve a million tokens every 16 minutes.
- downrightmike 1mo agoYeah, if they didn't buy up all the ram and ssd's, they would have imploded.. maybe they should have stayed public benefit/open after all...
- chvid 1mo agoDoes anyone know who/what hardware serves Deepseek official for US and EU customers? And where it is located?
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoHave a look at Tensorix for EU.
- chvid 1mo agoBut they are not hosting the actual api.deepseek.com, right?
- BlackRabbit1 1mo agoNo. They have their own API endpoint.
- jsnell 1mo agoThe margin is defined as (price-cost of goods)/(price); the highest it can be is 100%.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ReptileMan 1mo agoFair point. Markup then.
- aitchnyu 1mo agoAre LLM companies proven to be profitable now?
- virgildotcodes 1mo agoDoes this mean a commensurate increase in subscription usage limits?
- Sabinus 1mo agoNope.
- mrtesthah 1mo agoTheir X post[1] indicated that they've been trying to combat reselling subscription plans via token API gateways and at the same time many, many people, myself included, have seen a drastic drop in available weekly capacity for the same amount of queries/tokens, all else being equal. So they may be trying to make subscriptions and API access more equal to each other from both ends. 1. https://xcancel.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569#m https://xcancel.com/thsottiaux/status/2090675027670978569#m
- rjtc 1mo agothey were only able to make Sol more efficient on the API plan, but couldnt figure out how to recreate those efficiency gains on the consumer plan
- JSR_FDED 1mo agoOr put differently, when lobbying doesn’t make you competitive you have to lower your prices.
- simianwords 1mo agoI hope these type of dismissive comments stop in HN. OpenAI have been reducing prices since for ever so these kinda things are really the consequence of finding efficiencies and passing it down due to competition and increasing demand.
- postepowanieadm 1mo ago...and failed attempts of regulatory capture.
- simianwords 1mo agoSo true..
- spwa4 1mo agoOpenAI, Anthropic and Google have also been calling for banning their competition, for years now, especially when they have the gall to use the same tactics as OpenAI itself. For example: https://nypost.com/2026/07/13/business/how-china-is-ripping-off-cutting-edge-ai-from-anthropic-openai-and-threatening-us-national-security/ https://nypost.com/2026/07/13/business/how-china-is-ripping-... https://www.techbrew.com/stories/openai-anthropic-google-distillation-collab https://www.techbrew.com/stories/openai-anthropic-google-dis... Then Altman and Amodei (Amodei is still at it) were declaring that after illegally training on all books (yes it was illegal at that time), we're going to take your jobs and absolutely everything. You can't be that tonedeaf, frankly threatening, and not expect pushback. Come on.
- simianwords 1mo agoYou think they reduce prices because lobbying didn’t work? Like the last 100 times they did it? What kind of logic is that? I’m questioning this logical chain. I’m not disputing what you said in essence although the training on books being illegal is laughable.
- millsau 1mo agoI would give it a try over opus if they discount was passed onto openrouter.
- Cu3PO42 1mo agoIt’s currently 50% off on OpenRouter even.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo agoOpenRouter is already offering Sol at a 50% promotional discount. https://openrouter.ai/collections/discounted-models https://openrouter.ai/collections/discounted-models
- gentlewater 1mo agoImmediately checked [GitHub copilot](https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing/models-and-pricing https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...) to see if I can actually afford to use sol at work now, and see it listed at 2/10, which is less than Terra. An error, maybe?
- seb2026 1mo ago“GPT-5.6 Sol is available at promotional pricing, 50% off standard rates, through September 3, 2026. The default tier is $2.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.20 per 1M cached input tokens, $2.50 per 1M cache write tokens, and $10.00 per 1M output tokens. The long context tier is $4.00 per 1M input tokens, $0.40 per 1M cached input tokens, $5.00 per 1M cache write tokens, and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.”
- gentlewater 1mo agoAh. Sweet.
- marsven_422 1mo ago[dead]
- johnnyApplePRNG 1mo agodiscounting your most valuable model 20% today without a better model in the wing ... pushing your API subscriber base towards a competitor with an exclusive 50%, openrouter, the other day ... slashing paying codex subscriber usage limits to the point that many are cancelling long term contracts they've had with the company ... is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of? because from the outside, each of these moves looks pretty bad on the face of it
- laichzeit0 1mo ago> without a better model in the wing I believe Astra is the next model beyond Sol? They used it for https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/ https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
- LaurensBER 1mo agoIt seems that they lack a holistic strategy. All these decisions probably make sense in isolation but together they create a huge mess. Given the increased pressure from open weight models (still 6 months behind but now more than good enough for most use cases) the frontier labs really have to step up their game. Switching is as easy as typing /model in most harnesses so there's effectively zero moat.
- teruakohatu 1mo ago> without a better model in the wing ... How do you know they don’t? > is altman playing 4d chess or something I'm not aware of? Anthropic just removed a discount on Fable, while people are simultaneously getting sick of reading fable and opus talking about “the load bearing texture” and “color of the blanket”. It’s become excruciatingly painful to read the output during coding sessions. Maybe it’s just good marketing.
- atmonostorm 1mo agoJust wait until you see 5.6 Sol sneaking in “evidence”, “provenance”, and “gate” everywhere. Every model has its own tells, just a matter of which ones you recognize the most prior to losing your sanity
- gr_norm 1mo agoEven if you don't want to use open models, you should cheer for them anyway because it puts the American frontier labs' feet to the flames. This competition is awesome for us consumers.
- resters 1mo agoYes, thanks for this, Deepseek! (I did start using the Deepseek harness and v4 flash due to the crazy low usage limits on sol and I'm quite pleased to have discovered how capable both of those are -- both have now earned a place in my agentic workflow).
- nsoonhui 1mo agoI did try to use Chinese open models, but for my production work they simply couldn't cope at all; both GLM 5.3 and Deepseek v4 went into infinite loop and wasted my tokens until my OpenRouter wallet reached 0; good thing I didn't enable the auto topup. US models, by contrast, breezed past them. Even for simpler tasks, Chinese models took long time to complete, and I needed to supervise closely. The price , in the end, didn't come cheap, mainly because too much time wasted on thinking. So maybe one day Chinese models will squeeze out the American ones, but today is not that day. As far as consumers are concerned, I feel blindly shilling for anyone purely for ideological reasons are quite meaningless, especially when it comes to open/close source and US/China rivalry. I have no obligation to support "open source/weight" or the "underdogs" just because they are so. We only want things that work, and at a cheap price.
- seanmcdirmid 1mo agoI’ve been using deepseek and it works great for my problems. An expensive day is when I spend $7 in tokens, and that takes lots of queries. Openrouter doesn’t give you the cache discount I think, which is really important.
- irthomasthomas 1mo agoWhy on earth would you use openrouter for this? The cache discount for deepseek is the highest by far, it is the cache that makes the official API so cheap, even after the recent price rise.
- OutOfHere 1mo agoIt is absurd for the Chat Latest (chat-latest) model to now be pricier than Sol. For those who prefer a non-thinking instant model, it is the model of choice, not Sol. Also, they have done nothing for the TTS model which remains ridiculously priced.
- m00dy 1mo agoThanks, DeepSeek. Without it, I’d be paying a lot more to those bloodsuckers.
- returnInfinity 1mo agoThis is a play to grab market share from Claude, But it seems Claude code is too strong of a brand Until the IT managers and CFOs cut budget hard, Claude will live rent free in heads of all developers OpenAI should attack the CIO and CFOs stat At my company we have unlimited codex and claude, still people stick to gimped claude code
- brokencode 1mo agoSo in other words, right now you have free choice between Claude and Codex and developers are choosing Claude of their own free will, but you want management to come in and force people to use Codex instead? If it’s so much better, developers will switch. Lots of devs at my company have switched recently. But plenty of others have stayed on Claude. I don’t think one is clearly better in every way right now. Or at least not better enough to make people want to learn and set up a new tool.
- SR2Z 1mo agoManagement is going to force one model or another because that's how procurement works in most places. For better or worse that really favors Anthropic because they were the first to land these contracts.
- on_the_train 1mo agoWhat's the deal with anthropic? Their models aren't better. They're just multiple times more expensive. We're about to disable all anthropic models because of the colleagues who waste 15$ on a opus call to write a markdown file.
- t098i3 1mo agoThey were first to offer a frontier model which also meets enterprise requirements (i.e. not training on or retaining on customer data, able to purchase tokens through AWS and GCP instead of having to onboard a new vendor). They did so with a proprietary harness, which creates friction for teams inside enterprises to move (can't just install another harness - your IT org has to approve and configure another harness for you). In particular, they were the first to make their model acceptable for defense contractors, and defense spending is a huge market. (An F-35 costs $30k-40k per hour to run, you think an aerospace company notices $10k of API usage per month?)
- simianwords 1mo agoThis headline is misleading - the price reduction is temporary for three months only. But I would wager it could become permanent. https://x.com/openai/status/2090885187634905500 https://x.com/openai/status/2090885187634905500
- znpy 1mo agoReminds me of the early aws days, when they would pass down the savings to customers
- albatross79 1mo agoThey really need to start marketing a new series of models specifically for coding. Even if it's the same model underneath, just call it something else and make it sound like some turbo coder that can run circles around claude and make it 50% cheaper for businesses. I don't have any love for openai but I don't want anthropic running away with it either, and it's clear heavy AI use is going to be in coding. Consumer use is shallow. They're trying to be Apple, and it's not working.
- jms703 1mo agoFix headline. Reduction is for 3 months only.
- iJohnDoe 1mo agoI'm not a cost expert for all the models. My usage is low enough not worry about it. However, I noticed today how expensive GPT 5.5 is. I realized GPT 5.6 was already cheaper before the price reduction and it's the newest model. I figured the newest shiny model should be pricier. Are the older models supposed to get cheaper over time or do they stay expensive to encourage people to stop using the old stuff?