Topic hub · 14 pieces

Model pricing

List prices moved in both directions in 2026. OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% on July 30, three weeks after launch. A fortnight later DeepSeek's peak and off-peak billing took V4-Pro output from a flat $0.87 to $3.96 per million tokens at peak.

At the top of the range, Claude Opus 5.5 launched on September 22 at $4 and $20 per million input and output tokens and GPT-6 Sol at $2 and $10, about 90 minutes apart. Per-task cost diverges further: on one independent index Opus 5.5 spent $5.98 a task against $3.26 for GPT-6 Astra. The model-release tracker lists each launch price the lab published.

Timeline

  1. · Models

    Google just priced the generative-media floor: $0.034 an image

    Google shipped Nano Banana 2 Lite at $0.034 per image and Gemini Omni Flash at $0.10 per second of video on the same day, setting a public floor price for high-volume generative media low enough to change who can afford to run it.

  2. · Models

    Google shipped three Flash models the day its flagship went missing

    Google's July 21 drop cut Flash token prices 17% and added a security-tuned Cyber variant, but the tell is the model that didn't ship: Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised for June, is still partner-only while compute moves to Gemini 4.

  3. · Models

    Half the price of frontier

    Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5 as near-frontier intelligence at half the cost of Fable 5, and read from the P&L, the launch is a margin admission that the race has moved from raw capability to cost-per-task.

  4. · Business

    The margin is the message

    In twelve days, Chinese labs pushed the capability floor toward zero, Anthropic halved the price of the frontier and Google cut Flash tokens again, a fortnight that says the capability premium is over and margin is the only battleground left.

  5. · Models

    The model that cut its own price

    OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% three weeks after launch, saying Sol rewriting its own production kernels funded the cut, which makes the real story less a blink at China than a model becoming a line item on both sides of its own P&L.

  6. · Models

    Post-training is the new pre-training

    Grok 4.6, Gemini 3.7 Flash, DeepSeek V4-Pro-0813, and GLM-5.3 shipped within three days of each other and not one is a new base model; the frontier is advancing by post-training, harness, and serving efficiency while every next-generation base stays in the oven.

  7. · Business

    DeepSeek raised prices 1,100% and nobody flinched

    DeepSeek's peak/off-peak billing takes effect today, with V4-Pro output up 4.5x at peak and cache-hit input up as much as 12x a fortnight after OpenAI cut Luna 80%, evidence that the price war is convergence toward the true marginal cost of intelligence, not a race to zero.

  8. · Models

    Claude Fable 5.1 cuts the cache price 75%. At max effort, a task still costs more.

    Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 to everyone and the same weights as Mythos 5.1 to vetted US organizations, cutting cache reads 75% to $0.25, but the first independent run found a max-effort task costs 20% more than on Fable 5.

  9. · Models

    GPT-6 Astra costs 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol, and its best cyber scores belong to a model users can't run

    OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on September 3 at $10 and $50 per million tokens, 2.5 times GPT-5.6 Sol's promotional rate, as the first model it rates Critical in cybersecurity, and several of its biggest launch numbers describe configurations buyers do not get.

  10. · Models

    TypeSafe's Jev gives up text to sell probabilities at $0.042 per million tokens

    TypeSafe's Jev answers typed questions with probabilities instead of generated text, which lets it charge $0.042 per million input tokens with free output, but its headline speed and cost multiples come from four workflows the company built itself.

  11. · Models

    Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol shipped the same day, and neither launch table could see the other

    Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20 per million tokens and OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol at $2 and $10 about 90 minutes apart on September 22, and because each launch table benchmarks the other lab's previous model, the price sheets are the only like-for-like comparison.

  12. · Models

    GPT-6.1 Sol costs a fifth of Astra. Fast Sol costs more than Astra.

    GPT-6.1 Sol ties GPT-6 Astra on OpenAI's own coding benchmark at $2 and $10 per million tokens, a fifth of Astra's rate, but its Ultrafast tier costs $12 and $60, which moves OpenAI's price premium from intelligence to latency.

  13. · Models

    Three labs, six weeks, one tie: grading the autumn frontier against independent reruns

    Anthropic, OpenAI and Google shipped new flagships between September 1 and October 13, and once independent evaluators reran the headline benchmarks the frontier compressed into a statistical tie, leaving cost, tokens, speed and access as the differences buyers can measure.

  14. · Models

    Frontier on a desktop: the weights fit, but the price cap comes from the cloud

    Seven weeks of open-weight releases put models within a benchmark generation of the frontier on a $5,499 Mac Studio or a 12 GB gaming GPU, but the measured numbers show batched cloud hosts, not desktops, now set the price of mid-market tokens.

In the data

Rows from the CC BY 4.0 datasets that these pieces report. Each links to its row, primary source and method.

Model releases · 36

Key primary sources

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Tag: pricing Tag: price-war Tag: margins Department: Models Department: Business All topic hubs