OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol API pricing by over 20%, $4 input and $20 output for three months
On Aug 21 OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Sol API and credit pricing by over 20%: input from $5 to $4, cached input from $0.50 to $0.40, output from $30 to $20 (33% cut). Plus/Pro/Business subscription pricing unchanged. Promotion runs through Nov 21.
On August 21 local time, OpenAI announced in its developer community that pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol, the company's frontier model, has been reduced by over 20 percent on the API and on purchased credits. The new pricing is available immediately via the API and will roll out to eligible ChatGPT Work and Codex credit plans, valid through November 21. Pro, Plus, and Business subscription usage and pricing remain unchanged.
Under the updated short-context list price, GPT-5.6 Sol input drops from $5 to $4 per million tokens, cached input from $0.50 to $0.40 per million tokens, and output from $30 to $20 per million tokens, a 33 percent cut on the output side. For a workload consuming one million input tokens and producing one million output tokens, the total cost falls from $35 to $24, a 31 percent reduction. The parallel credit-pack rate moves from 125/12.5/750 to 100/10/500 credits per million tokens across input, cached input, and output.
GPT-5.6 Sol is the flagship tier of the GPT-5.6 family launched on July 9, with a 1.05M context window, up to 128K output, tool use, computer use, hosted shell access, and reasoning settings from none through max. On July 30 OpenAI cut mid-tier Terra by 20 percent and entry-tier Luna by 80 percent; today's move extends the pricing reset across all three tiers, preserving a clean gradient at $4/$20 for Sol short-context, $2.50/$15 for Terra, and $1/$6 for Luna. The cut comes against mounting competition from Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 ($5/$25) and from Chinese models GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4-Pro, which have closed in on frontier coding and agent benchmarks.