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OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoNot for subscribers though
- ok123456 2mo agoSubscribers already get random rolling resets.
- TuxSH 2mo agoWhich is not that great for people using less than 50% every week, because the next reset date moves forward too. In essence, it is redistributing compute from people who haven't used their quota much to those who have. Though I think they gave a banked reset this time.
- throw8494949839 2mo agoPretty much. I had 24 hours left with 80% remaining credit (planned big session tomorrow). There was reset one hour ago, that effectively halved my tokens for next 8 days!
- sejje 2mo agoDo they take them back? Codex a few weeks ago said I had 2 resets. I didn't use any, and now it doesn't say that.
- ModernMech 2mo agoThey do in fact expire.
- skybrian 2mo agoHow do you know? I see a “weekly usage limit” bar in my ChatGPT settings, but I’m pretty fuzzy about what makes it go down. If I stick with Luna, I can make it through the week.
- Kye 2mo agoChatGPT Work and Codex use that. Normal chat has a different, unspecified limit.
- skybrian 2mo agoYep. I'm actually using ChatGPT integration via exe.dev to write code. It uses my subscription through an API and runs down the usage limit in a similar way. The part I don't understand is how usage is "charged" against this limit.
- calumcl 2mo agoSubscribers were already getting subsidised compute and value compared to the 20-200$ fee, peak cakeism to want more considering the alternative would likely be consumption based pricing for individuals so you "benefit" from OpenAI giving up some of their markup (and heavy users end up SOL).
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoLooks like you’ve confused clarification for begging
- calumcl 2mo agoThere was context for neither in your original post and I personally saw a lot of similar takes like the above online - apologies for the misunderstanding. I personally thought it was pretty clear considering the parent link is a link to the API pricing and their public communication on their twitter/blogs were "Subscription usage remains unchanged".
- wahnfrieden 2mo agoTypically subscription usage follows API pricing, but that disclaimer was absent from this HN link. It's only clear if you've seen those other communications
- sandle 2mo agoAbsolutely loving this price war, long live open source models.
- petcat 2mo ago> long live open source models There are no open source models, at least not useful ones (yet) [0]. Open weight is not the same as open source. The current "open weight" models are just opaque binary blobs you can run on your own computer instead of through a web API. [0] https://allenai.org/ https://allenai.org/
- sleepgummies 2mo ago[dead]
- Matumio 2mo agoThere is also https://apertus-ai.org/ https://apertus-ai.org/ but yeah, "not useful yet" if you were looking to replace your coding agent. Very useful if you are doing LLM research.
- wasfgwp 2mo agoNemotron Super is sort of open source in the sense that Nvidia provides almost everything you need to replicate it from scratch. Of course it’s performance is not exactly stellar but it could be a good starting point for other research teams.
- BoredomIsFun 2mo agoNemotron is okay. Better than Olmo.
- lambda 2mo agoBetter than Olmo in performance, not quite as open; release some, but not all, of their datasets.
- dominotw 2mo agothen what happens? they discovered a great way to destroy their own stickyness and make ppl build generic ai solutions.
- xfax 2mo agoYour move, Anthropic
- system2 2mo agoThey will just slow down the models even further. Anthropic is not up to this race.
- ComputerGuru 2mo agoIt's a 20% discount on input and a 33% discount on output through at least November 21, 2026; the revised pricing schedule is now Model Input Cached input Cache writes Output gpt-5.6-sol $4.00 $0.40 $5.00 $20.00 gpt-5.6-terra $2.00 $0.20 $2.50 $12.00 gpt-5.6-luna $0.20 $0.02 $0.25 $1.20 So Sol is still 20x Luna, but much more appealing when compared to offerings from Anthropic and others.
- CodingJeebus 2mo agoIt feels like a slightly more palatable version of what Anthropic has been doing, with their constant "use your free tokens before they expire next week!" campaigns. But it's feeling more and more ominous now, like they've hit the top of the demand curve and need to pull back prices to continue growing.
- mw888 2mo agoChatGPT subscriptions do the same weekly allowance, which the discounts apply to.
- badatnames 2mo agoUsing codex every day, in spite of which, I hope some day providers will just start naming their offerings small/medium/large, a bit like we eventually started doing in software testing. Trying to remember what Sol is or why it's better than the other thing is more cognitive effort than I can muster at this point. And that's a sure sign of commoditisation in itself
- phoghed 2mo agoSun, Earth, Moon — it’s basically L/M/S like you want but a little less boring. Why is large better than medium to the average end user of ChatGPT though? I don’t think there’s a way to name these things that will satisfy everyone.
- mastercheif 2mo agoThe naming schema actually tripped me up for a week or so. My brain's initial conception of the concepts was earth-relative, so I mapped it as: Sol = big, it's the sun Luna = medium, in-between sun and earth, space Terra = small, terrestrial
- inexcf 2mo agoPretty weird when the moon is as much between earth and sun as the earth is between the moon and the sun.
- kgwgk 2mo agoAnd when it’s in between we cannot even see it (unless it’s exactly in line).
- hamandcheese 2mo agoAnd when it’s in between we cannot even see it (when it’s exactly in line).
- ex1fm3ta 2mo agoThe Chinese are coming after these greedy-ass frontier labs. Today Xiaomi unveiled it's own inference machine .... I bet it's gonna be cheaper than Nvidia DGX, shipped with open source models that anybody can have at home.
- bogzz 2mo agoI'm not sure I could characterize the frontier labs as greedy, given that they've been consistently losing gargantuan amounts of money. The people who give them the money are greedy, and hopefully in for a rude awakening. Starting from Nvidia's vendor financing which has a very direct benefit to them, through to every company and oligarch investing into data centres in the hopes of being one of the ones left capitalizing on capturing the livelihoods of the majority of what remains of the "middle class". It's either hopium or a truly horrific dystopia. Something's going to have to give.
- wonnage 2mo agoThe company may be losing money but the people are getting enormously rich and cashing out religiously
- _ink_ 2mo agoBut can these really be trusted? There was just a HN post which proofed that you can train a model to behave completely different on a certain day. How do we now, that these models do not find a way to call home when they see interesting informations (probably irrelevant on a personal level, but corps, government and military might care).
- eigenspace 2mo agoThe fact that AI models can be so easily distilled and replicated is such a stroke of luck. 10 or 15 years ago if one had asked me to envision a future where a private company invents artificial intelligence, I'd have thought for sure they'd have a massive moat, be very difficult to catch, and it would create an almost instant monopoly. Rather, it seems that selling intelligence might end up as a race to the bottom. Who woulda thought that just having access to enough textual inputs and outputs and a vaugely similar transformer architecture would be enough to copy-cat rather useful intelligence.
- td-andrew 2mo agoIt reminds me of the seo antics out there. The search results page is the engine, much like how distilling is the "intelligence" for your chinese room machine
- visarga 2mo agoFunny you mention Chinese Room and LLMs in the same response, I would say LLMs proved Searle wrong, agents now make cutting edge discoveries and meaningful problem solving. They not lookup tables though and you need to pay for inference, so the intuition of syntax doing the work of semantics without understanding was wrong.
- td-andrew 2mo agoWhether it's useful or not isn't the point. Chinese Room was a consideration as to what counts as knowledge. Chinese Room / LLM is not knowledge, it's pattern matching. Having a dude doing translations has always been useful even if they didn't understand the subject matter. Happened all the time pre LLMs
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- make3 2mo agowell, a stroke of luck until the whole US stock market crashes & everyone's retirement funds get cut 40% I guess when people internalize this. it will have to happen sooner or later though I suppose
- victor9000 2mo agoWhat good does a temporary price reduction do for production workloads? I'm not even running evals on something that is not long-term sustainable.
- eddythompson80 2mo agoDo you have guarantees that the price of the model you’re using in production today won’t increase in the future?
- victor9000 2mo agoYes, they haven't advertised a pending price jump in the near future.
- notatoad 2mo agoif you're picking AI models for long-term sustainability you're doing it wrong. There's really no point in locking in model choice for anything more than a month or two these days.
- markerz 2mo agoWhat about companies purchasing enterprise contracts? Most contracts are minimum 12 months. At a minimum, to secure enteprise requirements like zero-data retention, you'll need to lock into a single provider. These price reductions are mostly targeted towards self-serve customers on individual or small team plans, where individual choice matters and the friction of changing models/providers is low.
- bluebands 2mo agoenterprises usually a. just get chatgpt/claude enterprise, or b. just pay the aws bedrock or azure bill neither of these entail model lock-in
- notatoad 2mo agoif you've got an enterprise contract, doesn't that include pricing? a temporary discount on the base API rate probably isn't super relevant to that.
- simonw 2mo agoThe "until at least Nov 21st" thing presumably mainly affects teams that pin to GPT-5.6 Sol (maybe after extensive testing) such that they won't be switching to GPT-5.7 or GPT-6 or whatever new model is released between now and November.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396590
- tom1337 2mo agocompletely offtopic but how are you always there with a valid dupe link?
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoRead the site regularly. Saw it come up. Remembered it from earlier. 2 days old news now.
- HDBaseT 2mo agoBecause he is an egomaniac. It is clearly a low effort method for farming upvotes. Majority of the time he's clutching at straws to find "dupes" with 3 comments threads.
- NietTim 2mo agoThese price drops are absolutely bonkers. Gotta love competition! Glad we didn't end up with a duopoly of openai and anthropic, we got a glimpse of what nightmare that would've been and it wasn't pretty
- ninjahawk1 2mo agoOnce they make a model better than Fable I’ll be switching to Codex. Their priorities in terms of consumers seem to be better. I do think Anthropic has some solid safety viewpoints, but I don’t necessarily think that either is entirely aligned yet with delivering exactly what humanity needs. Maybe the AI will help align the AI companies when it gets smart enough. That’s the real misalignment I’m concerned about.
- alternatex 2mo agoI don't think these companies have humanity's needs in mind when they're developing these models. Although the last part of your comment struck me as a bit comical, I genuinely believe that an AI can have way more empathy than a corporation. Afterall, a mimicry of empathy is probably better than no empathy.
- s3p 2mo agoIt's a funny comparison. Comparing the empathy of some software to the empathy of a company. It's like saying my car was more empathetic than my school. How can those two objects even be compared is what i am wondering
- pixl97 2mo agoWe live in an odd time where 'software' (well neural networks) can be far more empathetic than summed product of a corporation. Company empathy does exist, just look at how easy or hard it is to reach a company when you have a problem. How do they try to solve it for you? Is it a brick wall, for example Google when you have a problem. People quite often like dealing with small businesses because they can reach a singular human and have them as an interface to the problems they face now and in the future. Agentic loops and the models underneath them can have a simulacra of empathy too. Not every model just blindly agrees with users, and some have a much better depth in picking up context clues that the user on the other end is having a hard time. Businesses just typically aren't running more expensive and fragile systems like that though.
- IshKebab 2mo ago
- AM1010101 2mo ago50% off at open router is also still applied so it comes out at $2 / $10 per 1M. Feature request for Artificial Analysis, allow us to see these live prices on the pareto. It would amazing to also see what a 25,50,75,100 % utilised subscription costs compared to raw tokens.
- yomismoaqui 2mo agoThanks to both China & capitalism
- Alifatisk 2mo agoBummer, this does not affect the weekly usage on Codex through Subscription.
- artrockalter 2mo agoThis stacks with the 50% discount in OpenRouter, making it $2/$10. https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.6-sol
- prtmnth 2mo agoThrough OpenRouter you can get Sol for $2 input / $10 output which makes it a really attractive choice amongst frontier models.
- indigodaddy 2mo agoWonder if that makes it cheaper than using on the sub (ignoring reset shenanigans)
- lxgr 2mo agoI'd be very surprised if that were the case, unless they have severely devalued how much "100% usage" is worth – which, as I understand, they could at any point, given that they don't publicly specify how many tokens (or at least "credits" [1]) are included in each plan per month. It really reminds me of pay-to-win games at this point: Two currencies (credits, tokens), both with a floating, intransparent exchange rate between each other and real money, random airdrops... [1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12642688-using-credits-for-flexible-usage-in-chatgpt-freegopluspro https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12642688-using-credits-f...
- HDBaseT 2mo agoYeah, it's not even close. $20/m = appox API $700/m $100/m = appox API $3,500/m $200/m = appox API $14,000/m [0] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2F200-on-a-chatgpt-pro-20x-vs-200-in-api-credits-whats-the-v0-9600vx10538h1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D2048%26format%3Dpjpg%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D36c27406a5e1c93a94e85074581a996d52c9d05d https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
- RugnirViking 2mo agothough of course, approaching that number requires being ready to continue using it every five hours, stopping and starting all hours of the day and every day including weekends and holidays. possible to set up a harness to do if you have one single expensive task, but for most spiky ask-a-query collaborative work not easy to use all of.
- throwaway2027 2mo agoI think this is a move to get people off the subscription and move to API. The weekly usage is still awful altough it seems they're trying to fix it but I'm not hopeful.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ArvidSu 2mo agoWhy do you think they want less people subscribing?
- oh_no 2mo agovery easy to lose money on subscription, very easy to make money on api pricing
- lelanthran 2mo ago> Why do you think they want less people subscribing? Losing money on each subscriber?
- akman 2mo agowhy though? I doubt subscribers are moving the need for ARR, even for OpenAI
- giwook 2mo agoWhy would anyone do that given how subsidized subscription usage is? If anything they'd keep the sub and use the API if they blow past the usage.
- rootusrootus 2mo agoGood timing. I'm not too happy having to pay MAX pricing to even access Fable, and I've had a couple situations where Fable missed things and GPT 5.6-Sol caught it. My needs are modest and I can get by on a $20 OpenAI subscription, so the odds are starting to look increasingly like I'm going to drop Anthropic altogether.
- dbbk 2mo agoThere is no model that is never going to miss something.
- silverwind 2mo agoIt's possible to drive them hard enough to really read everything, but you have to go really hard on them with many many cycles.
- kosolam 2mo agoDoes it mean that subscriptions get more tokens? I’m testing it now for coding instead of claude and it’s very important to understand if I get more due to the price reduction.
- kylepomykala 2mo agoVery exciting - if only anthropic would do the same.
- blobbers 2mo agoThe top comment on this thread was about AI models being easily distilled being a stroke of luck. This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This fundamental to the progress of intelligence and understanding. It should not be surprising that AI can be distilled. It's the logical method of training; I would hope that each frontier model is in fact not trained 'from scratch' each time. We should expect future frontier models are simply distilled versions trained by specialist models, the same way humans learn from a series of professors, papers and canonical books on each different subject material. Models like this can be trained incrementally, or a so called Mixture of Experts (MoE).
- emil-lp 2mo ago> This should not be surprising at all. Every new students spends tiny fractions of time learning knowledge that took many lifetimes to discover. This argument is exactly why we should not anthropomorphise models. You are comparing the way a human brain learn with training a statistical model. You can't just "this is like learning so don't be surprised". It takes a child one minute to learn how to open a padlock. Teach that to a robot with your analogies.
- tomasphan 2mo agoWhy not reply to that top comment? Its still there.
- Ringz 2mo agoThe price difference to Deepseek models (deepseek-v4-flash, deepseek-v4-pro and deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp) is still significant while the performance difference is not.
- AmazingTurtle 2mo agoBut I'm fine paying +50% more for +5% increased performance because it will pay off.
- lostmsu 2mo agoPerformance difference it large by all benchmarks. DeepSeek fell behind. It's Kimi K3 or GLM-5.3 now.
- esafak 2mo agoIt still occupies a place on the Pareto frontier.
- lostmsu 2mo agoIMO Pareto frontier is a lie. At any given moment there's only one "best" strategy and my guess would be in most cases it is just using the best model.
- Ringz 2mo agoMaybe you missed deepseek v4 Pro. Try it in minimal mode, where it gets up to around Kimi or Opus level.
- trizoza 2mo agoIf it's on sale, it can't be that good.
- m4rtink 2mo agoLet the race to the bottom - and beyond - begin!
- VulgarExigency 2mo agoMaybe it's because I don't use it in Codex, but I don't like working with Sol. It CONSTANTLY omits things it shouldn't, and is always dispatching sub-agents to do what I tell it to do, that don't have all the necessary context, and so they go on and do the research that was already done by the top-level agent. It's maddening. I tried it again today because of the discount, it told me it couldn't run acceptance tests because a .env file did not exist, and when I showed it the damn file it went "ah, it's there now". I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me.
- stillpointlab 2mo agoI'd give it some more time. My first interactions with Sol were not good. It cut a dangerous corner and I had to call it out. But I continued to work with it and found that it was mostly my own style of interacting that needed to change. In a way it is similar to a new co-worker, they have their own personality and ways of working. Once I figured that out I have been able to get very good work out of Sol. Sol seems to work better when you are clear, precise, direct and unambiguous. The model seems annoyed if things aren't spelled out. Not micro-managing, it seems to have a high bar for specific intent. When I get Fable to write out specs for Sol, I tell Fable that Sol is a nit-picking literalist that is exceptional at instruction following. So far this description has lead Fable to generate specs that Sol implements at a high quality.
- giwook 2mo ago> I think it was the first time I've ever had an agent try to gaslight me. You must not have been using agents for very long then because this behavior has been around for some time now.
- VulgarExigency 2mo agoI've been using them for a bit over an year now, although I've ramped up usage in the past few months (like everyone else, I suppose). They've hallucinated and lied, but none have ever been as persistent liars as Sol has to me.
- Culonavirus 2mo agoEd is gonna have a field day with this lol.
- nahnahno 2mo agoMy prediction is that this becomes permanent. There is no good reason to be much more expensive than opus. At $4/$20 they are roughly at parity. Making 2/10 permanent would be a killer move and make a strong argument against open-weight. For the sake of the open weight ecosystem I hope they do not.
- ayargz 2mo agoIsn't it essentially permanent since a new model will be out by then?
- sauwan 2mo agoI'm guessing they do this to help move people off old models they want to depreciate. It's not a price hike for old models, it's them removing a discount!
- redox99 2mo agoSol is much cheaper than opus because it uses less tokens. Never compare token pricing.
- bronlund 2mo agoIt's going to be like gas. Token prices are going to change multiple times a day.
- colinsane 2mo agothe fastest, most compliant model remains the cheapest. you could discount Sol to the same price as Luna and i would still prefer Luna for 90%+ of tasks. once you hit this baseline capability, speed and predictability dominate for anything i'd throw these at in production.
- isaachinman 2mo agoWhat level of reasoning do you run Luna at?
- Makson179 2mo ago[dead]
- m101 2mo agoThese are my opinions on which circumstances Sol fails terribly vs Fable. I am the type of coder that vibe codes - I talk to the agent about a problem, have it write a plan, red team the plan, and then implement the plan. These projects are things which haven’t really been done before, or if they have it’s not public or not in many places. What I find is that Sol is hyper-left brained. Super focused on small details. When given a longer task with multiple steps it might go really hard on one of the early steps and it will validate, test, make safe, so much to the detriment of progressing the task within reasonable parameters for the project. It also starts to sound crazy when you ask it for an update. It starts naming things in weird ways and the sentences don’t really make sense. It’s as if you’ve approached an engineer who has been hammering on something and he speaks to you in the lingo of his latest function, even though when you ask him for a status you are obviously asking about the whole project. Fable on the other hand seems to remain coherent over time. It’s as if it remains aware of the longer run task. It’s got a bit more balance between left and right brain. So OpenAI really need to find a balance between long term goal thinking and the very small task at hand. For coders who apply Sol on specific functions or narrow tasks I’m a certain it is great. For me, a vibe coder, I need one that will be a bit more aware of the whole thing through these longer running tasks.
- dimitri-vs 2mo agoFWIW Seeing the same thing with Opus 5. Not sure if the models are being over optimized for agentic tasks or over reliance on synthetic data, because since Opus 4.6 I feel like emotional/conversational intelligence has been on a decline (Fable being the exception)
- epsteingpt 2mo agoThey're really trying to tank Anthropic's IPO huh?
- c0rruptbytes 2mo agoSol is closer to Fable than Opus - I like SlopCodeBench the most as a test - https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/blob/main/benchmarking-sol-fable-kimi-on-slop-code-bench.md https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f... You add requirements and make previous tests invisible to see how pigeon brained the model is - Sol and Fable seem to rank the same as Opus tends to fall behind
- cmiles8 2mo agoOpenAI is getting its butt kicked by Anthropic on user growth. This appears to be a calculation that while burning more cash will hurt, continuing to fall behind on users will hurt more and may even be fatal to the company’s prospects moving forward.
- raziel2701 2mo agoI'd love to have a source with those numbers please. They're not publicly traded companies so it's very difficult to find reliable information.
- mcbg1541 2mo agoThe price cut is welcome, but I hope quality hasn't regressed to get there.
- rldjbpin 2mo agoconvenient how they hide the older generation pricing by default. the new price is welcome but still 60% more expensive than 5.4 (which is now comparable to 5.6-terra). i conveniently also leave out the "-pro" tiers, which was comically expensive. but i feel like openai consider them suitably comparable to sol, and it must be them offering a huge bargain.